January 18, 1917] 
NATURE 389 
The question of what degree of evidence a single 
bloody smudge may give of the identity of some sup- 
posed miscreant with a convict having a previous 
official record is a matter for dispute. Still more is 
that of a case where, say, the right forefinger of 
Richard Roe tay be practically identical with the left 
ring-finger of John Doe. ‘Such similarity would be no 
evidence whatever for personal identification. In 
labouring to be brief I trust’ I have not been quite 
obscure.- Sir William, in his review of the history of 
this discovery, has not made any reference to my little 
contributions on the subject. He, however, did 
acknowledge my priority of publication in your columns 
of November 22, 1894, and for that ‘gift granted” I 
must feel grateful. HENRY Fautps. 
Stoke-on-Trent. 
_I wavE to thank you for your courtesy in forwarding 
me a copy of Mr. Faulds’s letter to you, and, in com- 
pliance with your request, I submit the following 
remarks, | . 
The only point I feel bound to notice is his complaint 
that I have not mentioned his name in my story of 
“The Origin of Finger-Printing.”” Mr. Faulds’s own 
account of his claim thas been so fully placed 
before the public in his letters to you from 
Japan, of October, 1880, and later, that I think I was 
right in keeping to that period of history, twenty years 
further back than his, which lay within my own know- 
ledge. 
Bat his present letter breaks through all bounds of 
social courtesy, and it is only his position as a pro- 
fessed man of science that justifies me in correcting him. 
Mr. Faulds has the temerity ‘to scout my statement 
that I was moved to study finger-printing by the fas- 
cination of Konai’s hand-mark (taken as it was for 
the same purpose as finger-prints now are). The 
finger-tips were badly smudged, but ithe small furrows 
on the palm were exquisite, and moved me to take 
better impressions than his from my own fingers, as I 
tell the reader on the same page, only Mr. Faulds 
ignores it. This is not the spirit of science. 
I will now, with your permission, show reason why 
I could not honestly have introduced Mr. Faulds’s 
name. His letter of 1880 announced that in the pre- 
vious year his attention was directed to the peculiari- 
ties of finger impressions on pottery, and that he had 
come to the conclusion, by original and patient experi- 
ment, that finger-prints were sufficiently personal 
in pattern to supply a long-wanted method of scientific 
identification, which should enable us to fix his crime 
upon any offender who left finger-marks behind him, 
and equally well to disprove the suspected identity of 
an innocent person. (For all which I gave him, and I 
still do so, the credit. due for a conception so different 
from mine.) But he went on to say :— There can 
be no doubt of the advantage of having a copy of the 
for-ever-unchangeable finger-furrows of. important 
criminals.” 
' This expression made me protest at once, in my 
reply, that I could not understand how, in less than 
two years, he could have come to the knowledge that 
the furrows were unchangeable. It had taken me 
nearly twenty years of sustained experiment to demon- 
strate this persistence of the patterns for at least fifteen 
years of a man’s life, and it is plainly impossible for 
any man with a scientific turn of mind to put this 
doctrine forward after only twenty months or so of 
experiment. My reply, therefore, of 1886 expressly 
challenged his authority for the statement, and he has 
never justified it. My challenge did oblige him to 
meet it.as best he could, but the nearest approach I 
have seen to an answer is the following extract from 
an article of his in Knowledge, April, 1911 :— 
NO. 2464, VoL. 98] 
“The mode I took to test whether the ridges ever 
shifted their situation or changed their form was by 
shaving away their elevations . . . having first taken 
careful imprints of the patterns. After the skin grew 
up again, fresh imprints were taken and compared 
with the old ones, . . . but in many hundreds of cases, 
tested thus three or four times, not one solitary 
example of a variation in pattern was detected.” His 
return to England broke the further investiga- 
tion. He goes on to say :—‘The firm conviction, 
however, was established in my mind, which nothing 
has occurred to change, that skin furrows for the 
Heo eee of identification are invariable throughout 
ife. 
This quotation is his latest statement of his authority, 
but it needs to be read with an extract from a previous 
letter of his, dated June 5, 1909, in which he says :— 
“One of my earliest experiments was to shave off 
the ridges of the finger-tips with razors; the pattern on 
the skin was reproduced with quite unvarying fidelity, 
unless part of the true (deep) skin was removed.” 
I take it that this is the only foundation he has for 
his claim to have known the law of persistency in 
1880. I leave it to men of science to judge whether 
his experiments sufficed to prove persistency of a finger 
pattern for life. W.. J. HERSCHEL. 
Warfield. ‘ 
The Date of the Introduction of the Term 
** Metabolic.’’ 
THE concept and the term ‘‘ metabolism" have played 
such a prominent part in the development of physio- 
logical science that it should be interesting to Know 
by whom, and when, the term was first used. Prof. 
Bayliss, in his ‘‘ Principles of General Physiology ”’ 
(1915, p- 263), says that, so far as he can discover, 
“metabolism "’ was first used by Sir Michael Foster in 
his “*Text-book of Physiology,” the first edition of 
Which was published in 1883. It seems, however, that 
there is a still earlier use of the term in the writings of 
no less well known an investigator than Theodore 
Schwann, enunciator of the cell-theory. The passage 
I allude to occurs in the chapter called ‘Theory of 
Cells,” the last in Section III. of Schwann’s classic, 
‘Microscopical Researches into the Accordance in the 
Structure and Growth of Animals and Plants, by Dr. 
Th. Schwann, Professor in the University of Louvain,” 
published in Berlin in 1839. My translation of it is 
that made in 1847 by Dr. Henry Smith, of London, 
for the Sydenham Society; it runs thus (p. 193) :— 
“The question, then, as to the fundamental 
power of organised bodies resolves itself into 
that of the fundamental powers of the indi- 
vidual cells... . These phenomena may be ar- 
ranged in two natural groups: first, those which 
relate to the combination of molecules to form a cell; 
secondly, those which result from chemical changes 
either in the component particles of the cell itself or 
in the surrounding cytoblastema, and may be called 
metabolic phenomena (rd peraBodtxov, implying that 
which is liable to occasion or suffer change).’"’ The 
italics are in the original. Here, then, so far as I 
know, is the first use of the term “ metabolic,” though 
undoubtedly not the first occurrence of the conception 
of chemical changes in living matter. Schwann uses 
the term ‘‘ metabolic’’ exactly in its present-day sense, 
the phenomena of change, interchanges, of material 
in and by living matter. 
The year 1839 may be taken’as the date of the 
introduction into biological terminology of the expres- 
sion ‘“‘ metabolic,” and the person Theodore Schwann, 
at one time professor in the ancient University of 
Louvain. , 
