194 Life and Letters of Francis Galton 



Oriental Races, Japanese, Chinese, Aino and Tibetans, whose anthropological 

 characters are so distinctive *. Further, an investigation should be made of the 

 finger-prints of prehistoric man, especially of palaeolithic man in the caves f- 

 Nay, we may go back further and ask what are the finger-prints of Tarsius, 

 to whom some anatomists, at any rate in the matter of the hand, believe man 

 to be more closely linked than to the anthropoids. The ancestry of man 

 might possibly be illuminated by still further study of the primates' finger- 

 prints. It is almost impossible to believe that the Urmensch had all men's 

 present finger-print patterns scattered in a roughly promiscuous way over 

 his digits! If he had, then it forms a huge stumbling-block in the evolution 

 of man from a primate form. 



Galton concludes his chapter by stating that he has studied the finger- 

 prints of men of much culture and of scientific achievement, of labourers and 

 artists and of the worst idiots. 



" I have prints of eminent thinkers, and of eminent statesmen that can be matched by 

 those of congenital idiots. No indications of temjjerament, character, or ability can be found 

 in finger marks, so far as I have been able to discover." (p. 197.) 



Chapter XIII (pp. 198-212), the final chapter, is entitled Genera, and as 

 it is substantially a reproduction of the matter on this topic in the Philo- 

 sophical Transactions (see our pp. 167-169), it seems unnecessary to analyse 

 its contents or repeat the criticisms already made on it by the present writer. 



Taking Galton's work as a whole we have to remember that it is the first 

 treatise on finger-printing and none has been published since. That it is full 

 of novel matter and teems with suggestions. That from the time of Purkenje 

 (1823) to Alix (1868) there had been no scientific contribution to the subject, 

 nor anything published which could provide Galton with material for study, 

 until his own Royal Society memoirs were issued. The whole of the scientific 

 treatment of finger-prints and the art of identification by means of them, 

 now spread over the civilised world, arose from Galton's labours, especially 

 those in this book. If anyone doubts this let him point to a single scientific 

 memoir on identification by finger-prints which antedates Galton's publica- 

 tions, or his campaign for finger-printing as an expert art. No one can realise 

 how insignificant were the results before Galton, who has not read his 

 Finger Prints. 



Decipherment of Blurred Finger Prints, 1893. In the following year 

 Galton issued a booklet of the above title, with the subtitle Supplementary 

 Chapter to "Finger Prints." Slender as is this volume (18 pp.), the important 

 part of which consists of sixteen plates, it is again a pioneer work. It shows 

 for the first time in numerous instances how evidence should be prepared which 

 might convince a jury of the identity of two finger-prints, even if one or both 

 those prints are badly impressed, or, as Galton puts it, "blurred." 



* I have already indicated why I do not think the researches of Kubo or Collins conclusive 

 as to racial differences. See the footnote p. 140 above. 



t See E. Stockis, " Le dessin papillaire digital dans l'art prehistorique," Revue Anlhropo- 

 logique, annee 30, 1920, p. xliii et seq. 



