184 



Life and Letters of Francis Galton 



classification arch, loop, whorl, and states that by including forked arches 

 and nascent loops (see our Plate XI, p. 181) as arches, he has given a more 

 liberal interpretation to the latter category in the tables of this chapter than 

 he has done elsewhere. His fundamental table is the following : 



Percentage Frequency of Arches, Loops and Whorls on the different 

 Digits from Observations on 5000 Digits of 500 Persons. 



From this table the following inferences may be drawn: 

 The patterns are not distributed indifferently either on the hands or on the 

 individual digits. The right hand has a redundancy of whorls and the left 

 of loops. The Fore Finger and to a lesser extent the Middle Finger have a 

 redundancy of arches, the Little Finger and the Middle Finger a redundancy 

 of loops, while the Thumb, Fore Finger and Ring Finger have the highest 

 number of whorls. When we compare the corresponding digits of the two 

 hands, we see little differentiation of pattern in Fore Finger, Middle Finger 

 or Little Finger, but a more marked difference between the Thumbs and 

 Ring Fingers of the two hands. While in the first group the percentages 

 differ - in the three fingers but are the same in the two hands, in the second 

 group they are nearly the same in the two fingers but differ in the two 

 hands (pp. 115-118). 



Dealing with the slope of the loop Galton notes that the "inner" slope 

 is much the more rare of the two for all the fingers but the forefingers, 

 where the proportions of inner to outer slopes are about in the ratio of 2 to 3 



(397. and 617.)*. ,, ' . _ 



The second problem, that of the resemblance of pattern in different digits, 



is divided by Galton into two sections, that of the resemblance in the same 



digits of the two hands, and that of the resemblance of different digits either 



in the same or different hands. He omits the little fingers because in 86°/ c 



to 90 7 o of cases both are loops. 



* Purkenje appears to consider that while the inner slope is the more rare, it is actually in 

 the forefingers in excess of the outer. 



