XIV IDENTIFICATION OF CRIMINALS 197 



the method of identification perfected by Berthillon 

 in France as a proof of the practical usefulness of 

 work originally begun solely from love of science. 

 By the Berthillon system exact measurements are 

 taken between certain well-known and fixed points 

 of the bony framework of the body which are 

 known not to change under different conditions of 

 life. To this means of identification, which the 

 British Government adopted, there was added, in 

 consequence of a report of a committee appointed 

 in 1893 by Mr. Asquith, the ingenious method of 

 personal identification by finger-marks, first used in 

 India by Sir William Herschel, but later elaborated 

 in this country by Mr. Francis Galton, who at his 

 sole cost, in 1888, opened and carried on the 

 Anthropometric Laboratory at South Kensington. 



Flower's own views on a possible classification of 

 the human species are set out in his Essays on 

 Museums, in a chapter elaborated from an address 

 given at the anniversary meeting of the Anthropo- 

 logical Institute, January 27, 1885. It may be 

 found exemplified, so far as craniology can illustrate 

 it, in the upper gallery of the British Museum. 



Linnaeus sketched out four primitive tj^es of man, the 

 European, Asiatic, African, and American. Blumenbach added 

 a fifth, the Malay. Cuvier suppressed the last two and reduced 

 them to three. 



After a perfectly independent study of the subject, I cannot 

 resist the conclusion, so often arrived at by various anthro- 

 pologists, and so often abandoned for some complex system, 

 that the primitive man, whoever he may have been, has in the 



