158 Life and Letters of Francis Galton 



property; (3) Advances by Opium Department to cultivators; (4) Receipts 

 of employers for wages to labourers ; (5) Survey of India, workers on engage- 

 ment, to prevent their re-enlisting in a distant area after discharge for mis- 

 behaviour; (6) Director-General of Post-offices in similar cases; (7) Medical 

 Department before granting certificate to examine; (8) In plague regulation 

 and for controlling the Mussulman pilgrims to Mecca. All these cases are in 

 addition to the matter of criminal identification. Galton suggests that 

 finger-prints should be used in cases of life-insurance, and after registering 

 for authenticating wills. The Indian Legislature had passed an act amending 

 the law of evidence, by declaring relevant the testimony of those who 

 had become proficient in deciphering finger-prints. It was clear that finger- 

 printing had taken on in India, and most of this was due to the energy of 

 Mr (later Sir) E. R. Henry. 



Galton discusses the classification for research, alludes to the difficulty 

 of the great preponderance of ulnar loops, which have to be distinguished 

 mainly by lineations. Galton himself counted the number of lineations from 

 "core" to the "V" or point of divergence of the ridges*. 



"Mr Henry reckons lineations on more than one finger, with the simplification of merely 

 noting whether their number exceeds or falls short of the average, and is thus able, as he states, 

 to cope successfully with his far larger collection than mine. His success in this respect seems 

 to me so surprising that I should greatly like to witness his methods tested on a really large 

 collection, say of 100,000, in which there would probably be found no less than 6000 cases of 

 all-loops of the ulnar kind, to be distinguished mainly by the method of lineations f." 



Galton then speaks of the Cairo Office, of which he had seen the working. 

 He notes several cases in which its efficiency had been proved, and this not 

 only for criminal purposes, but for the advantage of honest men, who were 

 given a registration and could thus demonstrate to a new employer that they 

 were the actual men, whose merits had been testified to by former masters. 

 Some such registration of servants would render written characters of more 

 value than they are at present in our own country. 



"Space does not permit me to go more fully into this large and interesting subject. It will 

 be a real gain if these remarks should succeed in impressing the public with the present and 

 future importance of Identification Offices, especially in those parts of the British Empire 

 where for any reason the means of identification are often called for and are not infrequently 

 absent. I think that such an institution might soon pi - ove particularly useful at the Cape." 



By such articles and frequent letters to the newspapers Galton kept the 

 topic of finger-printing to the fore. When in 1900 he read a paper before 

 the Khedivial Society of Geography in Cairo {, comparing the Egypt of 

 1846 with that of 1900, and spoke of the influence which D'Arnaud Bey had 



* Later termed the delta. 



f Henry was ultimately driven to count the ridges on the first two fingers of both hands, 

 and to make sixteen classes of the four numbers so obtained. But even this was not sufficient, 

 and for his indexing he counts the ridges on the little finger of the right hand with the view 

 of arranging in the order of that count the schedules in each of the sixteen classes. Galton 

 started the ridge counting and had already applied it to fore and middle fingers to break up 

 the large simple loop groups. 



I Bulletin de la Societe Khediviale de Geographie, V c Serie, No. 7, pp. 375-380. 



