iSo THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



for instance, to find in the handwriting of a young woman murderer, 

 who was of some social position, evidence of more than feminine in- 

 stability and coquetry is instructive; for the case was an aggravated 

 one of the murder, by poisoning, of three innocent victims — husband, 

 grandmother and brother — for the sake of trifling gain. 



A further control of these experiments, an attempt to diminish the 

 masking effect of class-imitativeness, might be achieved by international 

 work, by tests involving the discovery of similar graphic signs in the 

 writing of individuals separated by race and training. A repetition of 

 Binet's test as to the possibility of distinguishing sex-differences might 

 be of value in this country where sex-segregation in education is much 

 less pronounced than it is in France. 



Other sociological aspects of handwriting might no doubt be in- 

 vestigated. The variation in individual chirography due to the nature 

 of the letter written, be it of social import or a business note; the 

 change in penmanship that comes with the change of the relation of 

 the writer to the one addressed — all such observations, vague as they 

 are at present, merit consideration. Most suggestive of all is the shift 

 in style that comes when the writer addresses his own eye alone, yield- 

 ing himse]f to the fervor of composition or the mental dissipation of 

 being "off parade." But observations under such conditions must at 

 best be made stealthily. A hint at the possibility of the intrusion of 

 one's mental privacy and, conscience or vanity on the alert again, one's 

 writing hastens to resume its conventional legibility. 



The revelations of the autograph as a mental photograph, a graphic 

 representation of social relationships, have never been fully appreciated 

 by the sociologist, although the world at large has always accepted a 

 famous man's autograph as secondary in interest to his photograph 

 alone. The pretense, the dignity, the reserve, the finesse with which 

 one faces the world finds copy in the ostentation, the simplicity, or the 

 ambiguity with which one signs one's name. Indifferent though one 

 may be in penmanship in general, there is something intimate and 

 personal in the autograph that arrests one's interest, so that in the 

 somewhat fantastic world of images, of symbols, it often happens that 

 one adopts a mental picture of his own autograph as the official repre- 

 sentative of himself in the counsels of thought. 



In any case it is evident that there is a psychology as well as a 

 sociology of handwriting. Tremendously complicated as the problem 

 of diagnosis of individual traits from those tiny strokes of the pen 

 appears, it is yet a legitimate problem of science ; for the more progress 

 psychology makes, the more evident it becomes that there is not a 

 mode of expression which is not rooted to its finest detail in the com- 

 plex psycho-physical organism. Meanwhile, it is fortunate that the 

 task of identifying graphic signs should not be left wholly to the 



