MONKEY HAND-PRINTS 
THE arrangement of the fine ridges and grooves on the 
palmar aspect of the human hand has of late years been 
studied with great attention—first by Sir Francis Galton, 
and subsequently by Mr. Henry, now Chief Commissioner 
of the Metropolitan Police—in order to develop a satisfactory 
system of identification by means of “finger-prints.” That 
exceedingly important and interesting subject is not discussed 
in the present article, in which attention is restricted to the 
arrangement of these lines on the hands of monkeys, and 
their function in both men and monkeys. This study 
seems to have been ‘first seriously taken up by Dr. D. 
Hepburn, of Dublin, who communicated to the Dublin 
Society the results of his investigations, which were duly 
published in the Zransactions of that Society. The method 
employed by Dr. Hepburn was to take impressions of the 
hands of living monkeys on plates of glass coated with 
printers’ ink ; but there are many difficulties connected with 
this operation, and in preparing a series of impressions for 
the Natural History Museum, it occurred to me that I might 
be able to take them on paper from the hands of monkeys 
recently deceased. I accordingly communicated with the 
Prosector to the Zoological Society, asking him to be good 
enough to send me the right hands of some of the monkeys 
that died in the Society’s menagerie. With this request he 
very kindly complied, and from the specimens which from 
145 b Ke) 
