Supplement to " Ndture" October ig, 1905 



thrice the weight of Jjischke's, any illustrations of 

 the interesting'- process of organic change whereby 

 so many of the bristling consonants of the written 

 speech have dropped out of hearing in the spoken 

 dialects of the temperate central province, probably 

 for physiological and climatic reasons. 



Nevertheless, despite its many defects, it embodies 

 a good deal of new material from the vernacular 

 Tibetan lexicons which must prove suggestive to those 

 engaged in Tibetan researches who are sufficiently 

 advanced not to be mislid by its serious mistakes. 



L. A. W.^DDELL. 



FINGER-PRINT IDENTIFICATION. 

 Guide to Finger-print Identification. By Henry 



Faulds, L'.F.P.S., late -Sui-geon. Superintendent of 



Tsukiji Hospital, Tokyo. Japan. Pp. viii + 8o. 

 ■ (Hanley: Wood, Mitchell and Co., Ltd., 1905.) 



Price 5^. net. 

 T^R. FAULDS was for some years a medical officer 

 •*-' in Japan, and a zealous and original investi- 

 gator of finger-prints. He wrote an interesting letter 

 about them in N.wure, October 28, 1880, dwelling 

 Upon the legal purposes to which they . might be 

 applied, and he appears to be the first person who 

 published anything, in print, on this subject. How- 

 ever, his suggestions of introducing the use of finger- 

 prints fell flat. The reason that they did not attract 

 attention was presumably that he supported them by 

 no convincing proofs of three elementary propositions 

 on which the suitability of finger-prints for legal pur- 

 poses depends. It was necessary to adduce strong 

 evidence of the, long since vaguely alleged, perman- 

 ence of those ridges on the bulbs of the fingers that 

 print their distinctive lineations. It was necessary to 

 adduce better evidence than opinions based on mere 

 inspection, of the vast variety in the minute details 

 of those markings, and finally, for purposes of 

 criminal investigation, it was_ necessary to prove that 

 a large collection could be classified with sufficient 

 precision to enable the officials in charge of it to find 

 out speedily whether a duplicate of any set of prints 

 that might be submitted to them did or did not exist 

 in the collection. Dr. Faulds had no part in establish- 

 ing any one of these most important preliminaries. 



But though his letter of 1880 was, as above men- 

 tioned, apparently the first printed communication on 

 the subject, it appeared years after the first public 

 and official use of finger-prints had been made by Sir 

 William Herschel in India, to whom the credit of 

 originality that Dr. F"aulds desires to monopolise is 

 far more justly due. Those who care to learn the 

 facts at first hand should turn to N.ature, vol. xxii. 

 p. 605, for Dr. Faulds "s first letter, to vol. 1., p. 518, 

 for a second letter from him in reference to the Parlia- 

 mentary Blue-book on the " Identification of 

 Criminals," then just issued, and lastly to Sir Wm. 

 Herschel's reply in vol. li., pp. 77-8, where the ques- 

 tion of priority of dates is placed beyond doubt, by 

 the reprint of the office copy of Sir William's "demi- 

 official " letter of .-\ugust 15, 1877, to the then In- 

 spector of Prisons in Bengal. This letter covers all 

 NO. 1877, VOL. 72] 



that is important in Dr. Faulds's subsequent com- 

 munication in 1880, and goes considerably further. 

 The method introduced by Sir W'm. Herschel, ten- 

 tatively at first as a safeguard against personation, 

 had gradually been developed and tested, both in the 

 jail and' in the registering office, during a period of 

 from ten to fifteen years before 1877, as stated in the 

 above quoted letter to the Inspector of Prisons. 



The failure of Sir ,Wm. Herschel's successor, and 

 of others at that time in authority in Bengal, to 

 continue the dev(jlopment of the system so happily 

 begun, is greatly to be deplored, but it can be ex- 

 plained on the same grounds as those mentioned 

 above in connection with Dr. Faulds. The writer of 

 these remarks can testify to the occasional incredulity 

 in the early 'nineties concerning the permanence of 

 the ridges, for it happened to himself while staying 

 at the house of a once distinguished physiologist who 

 was the writer when young of an article on the skin 

 in a first-class encyclopaedia, to hear strong objections 

 made to that opinion. His theoretical grounds wen- 

 that the glands, the ducts of which pierce the ridges, 

 would multiply with the growth of the hand, and it 

 was not until the hands of the physiologist's own 

 children had been examined by him through a lens, 

 that he could be convinced that the lineTtions on a 

 child's hand might be the same as when he grew up. 

 but on a smaller scale. 



The literature concerning finger-prints is becoming 

 large. An excellent index to it will be found in .1 

 memoir by Otto Schlaginhaufen, just publishi d' 

 (Morphol. Jahrbuch, Bd. xxxiii., H. 4, and Bd. 

 xxxiv., H. I., Leipzig). But even this is incomplete, 

 for it takes no notic.e of Mr. Tabor's efforts in San 

 Francisco to obtain the official registration of th>- 

 finger-prints of the Chinese immigrants, whom it wa-- 

 found difficult to identify otherwise. This seems to 

 have occurred at some time in the 'eighties, possibh 

 before them, but dates are now wanting. 



Dr. Faulds in his present volume recapitulates his 

 old grieyance with po less bitterness than formerly. 

 He overstates the value of his own work, belittle-- 

 that of others, and carps at evidence recently given 

 in criminal cases. His book is not only biased and 

 imperfect, but unfortunately it contains nothing new 

 that is of value, so far as the writer of these remark^ 

 can judge, and much of what Dr. Faulds seems to 

 consider new has long since been forestalled. It 

 is a pity that he did not avail himself of the 

 opportunity of writing a book up to date, for hi- 

 can write w.ell,. and the photographic illustrations 

 which his publisher has supplied are excellent. 

 The experiences, of other countries ought soon 

 to be collated with those of England, in order to 

 develop ^ further .the art of classifying large collec- 

 tions of finger-prints. In Argentina, for example, 

 their use has wholly superseded Bertillonage, and on<- 

 would like to know with what success. A bureau 

 that can deal effectively with very many thousand^ 

 of cases would require a staff of particularlv intelli- 

 gent officials, and tl)e tradition of dealing in the same 

 way with certain transitional forms that are of 

 frequent occurrence. The more highly the art of 



