176 Life and Letters of Francis Galton 



by order of [? on] the camp sutler. To guard against forgery he signed his name [? wrote the 

 amount] across the impression made by his finger upon the order, after first .pressing it on his 

 office pad. He was good enough to send me the duplicate of one of these cheques made out in 

 favour of a man who bore the ominous name of 'Lying Bob' [see Fig. 30 on p. 175]. The im- 

 pression took the place of scroll work on an ordinary cheque ; it was in violet aniline ink, and 

 looked decidedly pretty. From time to time sporadic instances like these are met with, but none 

 are comparable in importance to the regular and official employment made of finger-prints by 

 Sir William Herschel, during more than a quarter of a century in Bengal. I was exceedingly 

 obliged to him for much valuable information when first commencing this study, and have been 

 almost wholly indebted to his kindness for the materials used in this book for proving the 

 pei-sistence of lineations throughout life. 



"Sir William Herschel has presented me with one of the two original 'Contracts' in Bengali, 

 dated 1858, which suggested to his mind the idea of using this method of identification*. It was 

 so difficult to obtain credence to the signatures of the natives, that he thought he would use 

 the signature of the hand itself, chiefly with the intention of frightening the man who made 

 it from afterwards denying his formal act ; however, the impression proved so good that 

 Sir W. Herschel became convinced that the same method might be further utilised. He finally 

 introduced the use of finger-prints in several departments at Hooghly in 1877, after seventeen 

 years' experience of the value of the evidence they afforded. A too brief account of his work 

 was given by him in Nature (Vol. xxm, p. 23, Nov. 25, 1880). He mentions there that he had 

 teen taking finger marks as sign-manuals for more than twenty years, and had introduced them 

 for practical purposes in several ways in India with marked benefit. They rendered attempts 

 to repudiate signatures quite hopeless. Finger-prints were taken of Pensioners to prevent their 

 personation by others after death ; they were used in the office for Begistration of Deeds, and 

 at a gaol where each prisoner had to sign with his finger. By comparing the prints of 

 persons then living, with their prints taken twenty years previously, he considered he had 

 proved that the lapse of at least that period made no change sufficient to affect the utility of 

 the plan. He informs me that he submitted, in 1877, a report in semi-official form to the 

 Inspector-General of Gaols, asking to be allowed to extend the process ; but no result followed. 

 In 1881, at the request of the Governor of the gaol at Greenwich (Sydney), he sent a description 

 of the method, but no further steps appear to have been taken there. 



"If the use of finger-prints ever becomes of general importance, Sir William Herschel must 

 be regarded as the first who devised a feasible method for regular use, and afterwards officially 

 adopted it." (pp. 26-29.) 



I have cited this long passage because I wish to give evidence that Galton 

 did ample justice to his predecessors, more justice than has since been done 

 to his own workf. Galton never claimed to have invented the idea of 

 identification by finger-prints. What he did do was to take up the matter 

 from the scientific standpoint to establish certain principles and the prac- 

 tical methods of operating them. It was his publications and his energetic 

 demonstration of the value of finger-print identification, not occasional 

 newspaper diatribes, which led to its adoption by the English Prison Service, 

 and ultimately to its acceptance throughout the civilised world. Much solid 



* One is reproduced on our Plate V, p. 146 and the other in Sir William Herschel's The 

 Origin of Finger Printing. 



f "In discussing the true natural history of the minute ridges upon the fingers Galton goes 

 no further than did the first physiologist of note who drew attention to their presence. This 

 was Nehemiah Grew." Louis Robinson in North American Review, May 15, 1905. Again: 

 "Mr Galton distinctly says in his Finger Prints, p. 2: 'My attention was first drawn to the 

 ridges in 1888,' etc. It is not a little remarkable to my mind that that date should so nearly 

 coincide with the period when I was interesting Sir Wollaston Franks, of the British Museum, 

 and other scientific authorities in the importance of this means of identification." Birmingham 

 Post, May 16, 1905. Dr Faulds cites only the first words of Galton's paragraph on p. 2. For 

 the full citation see our p. 142. 



