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                             THE ORIGIN OF
                            FINGER-PRINTING

                                  BY

                    SIR WILLIAM J. HERSCHEL, BART.


                           HUMPHREY MILFORD
                        OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
                     LONDON   EDINBURGH   GLASGOW
                NEW YORK   TORONTO   MELBOURNE   BOMBAY
                                 1916



                          PRINTED IN ENGLAND
                    AT THE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS




DEDICATION


    _TO SIR EDWARD HENRY, G.C.V.O., K.C.B., C.S.I._

    _Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police._


    _I am offering you this old story of the beginnings of
    Finger-printing, by way of expressing my warm and continuous
    admiration of those masterly developments of its original
    applications, whereby, first in Bengal and the Transvaal, and
    then in England, you have fashioned a weapon of penetrating
    certainty for the sterner needs of Justice._

                                               _W. J. HERSCHEL._
      _June, 1916._




PREFACE


The following pages have two objects: first, to place on record the
genesis of the Finger-print method of personal identification, from its
discovery in Bengal in 1858, till its public demonstration there in
1877-8; secondly, to examine the scanty suggestions of evidence that
this use of our fingers had been foreshadowed in Europe more than a
hundred years ago, and had indeed been general in ancient times,
especially in China.

In later years, and in energetic hands, the method has been developed
into a system far more effective than anything I contemplated, and I do
not go into that part of the story; but I believe these pages will
suffice to show the originality of my study of its two essential
features, the strict individuality and the stubborn persistence of the
patterns on our fingers.

The gift granted to me of lighting upon a discovery which promised
escape from one great difficulty of administration in India is more than
ever appreciated by me since I have lived to see the promise wonderfully
fulfilled there, and in other lands as well.

For the sake of interest I give, among the illustrations, several
examples of late 'repeats' taken many years after I left India; but
these do not belong to my story.




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


                                                                    PAGE
  Bengalee contract with R[=a]jyadhar K[=o]n[=a]i, 1858.
    (_Collotype_)                              _Between pages_ 8 _and_ 9

  Finger-print of Dr. R. F. Hutchinson, Medical Officer at Arrah
    Station, June 1859                                                10

  Finger-print of Captain H. Raban, Chief of the Police in Lower
    Bengal, July 29,1860                                              12

  Finger-print of the Mah[=a]r[=a]j[=a] of Nuddea, April 13, 1862     13

  Finger-print of Sir Charles Howard, Superintendent of Police,
    Nuddea, April 13, 1862; and repeat, 1908                          13

  Finger-print of Sir Alfred C. Lyall, 1877; and repeat, 1908         17

  Finger-print of Captain A. Coleman, P. & O. SS. 'Mongolia',
    February 1877                                                     17

  Finger-prints of Bech[=a] R[=a]m D[=a]s Adhik[=a]ri,
    (_a_) made in 1877, (_b_) made in 1892                            21

  Finger-print of W. F. Courthope, 1877; and repeat, 1913             27

  Finger-print of Captain V. H. Haggard, R.N., 1877, aet.
    2-3/4 years; and repeat, 1913. (_Collotype_)             _Facing_ 27

  Finger-print of Colonel J. Herschel, R.E., September 22, 1877       28

  Finger-print of Dr. J. F. Duthie, September 22, 1877                28

  Finger-print of Sir Theodore Hope, Bo.C.S., 1877                    29

  Finger-prints of William Waterfield, B.C.S., (_a_) July 31, 1860,
    (_b_) March 31, 1877                                              29

  Finger-prints of W. J. Herschel, (_a_) June 1859, (_b_) July 1859,
    (_c_) March 31, 1877, (_d_) February 22, 1916                     30

  Finger-prints, enlarged, of A. E. H. Herschel: 1881, aet. 7-3/4;
    1890, aet. 17; 1913, aet. 40                                      31

  'Thomas Bewick his mark'                                            33

  A 'tep-sai' of Bengal compared with a finger-print                  35

  Caste-marks of illiterates, 1865                                    36

  Finger-mark on a Chinese Bank-note. (_Collotype_)          _Facing_ 38




THE ORIGIN OF FINGER-PRINTING


In 1858, after five years' service, as an Assistant under the old East
India Company, in the interior of Bengal, I was in charge of my first
subdivision, the head-quarters of which were then at Jungipoor, on the
upper reaches of the Hooghly river. My executive and magisterial
experience had by that time forced on me that distrust of all evidence
tendered in Court which did so much to cloud our faith in the people
around us. We cannot be too thankful that things have greatly improved
in India in the last sixty years, but the time of which I am speaking
was the very worst time of my life in this respect. I remember only too
well writing in great despondency to one of the best and soberest-minded
of my senior companions at Haileybury[1] about my despair of any good
coming from orders and decisions based on such slippery facts, and the
comfort I found in his sensible reply.

  [1] Till 1857 the East India Company's College.

It happened, in July of that year, that I was starting the first bit of
road metalling at Jungipoor, and invited tenders for a supply of
'ghooting' (a good binding material for light roads). A native named
R[=a]jyadhar K[=o]n[=a]i, of the village of Nist[=a], came to terms with
me, and at my desire drew up our agreement in his own hand, in true
commercial style. He was about to sign it in the usual way, at the upper
right-hand corner, when I stopped him in order to read it myself; and
it then occurred to me to try an experiment by taking the stamp of his
hand, by way of signature instead of writing. There was nothing very
original about that, as an idea. Many must have heard of some such use
of a man's hand; and the correspondence that has taken place has brought
to light old instances of the hand, or the nail of a finger, or the
teeth in one's mouth, being used to certify a man's act, or a woman's.
But these have all been isolated instances. Sir Francis Galton, however,
has pointed out[2] that in our own times the engraver Bewick had a fancy
for engraving his thumb-mark, with his name attached, as vignettes, or
as colophons, in books which he published.[3] As a boy I had loved
Bewick on Birds: I regret that it is not now to be found in our library.
Galton's remark has reminded me that I used to see the thumb-mark there,
as well as I recollect, in an ornamental title-page. I mention this
because I dare say it had something to do with my fascination over
K[=o]n[=a]i's hand-markings. If so, the influence was unknown to me. The
absorbing interests of manhood had blotted out, not Bewick, but his
thumb-mark, from my memory. However that may be, I was only wishing to
frighten K[=o]n[=a]i out of all thought of repudiating his signature
hereafter. He, of course, had never dreamt of such an attestation, but
fell in readily enough. I dabbed his palm and fingers over with the
home-made oil-ink used for my official seal, and pressed the whole
hand on the back of the contract, and we studied it together, with a
good deal of chaff about palmistry, comparing his palm with mine on
another impression. Here is a facsimile of the whole document, made by
the Clarendon Press. I was so pleased with the experiment that, having
to make a second contract with K[=o]n[=a]i, I made him attest it in the
same way. One of these contracts I gave to Sir Francis (then Mr.) Galton
for his celebrated paper read before the Royal Society, November 1890,
to which body he presented it; the other lies before me now. Trials with
my own fingers soon showed the advantage of using them instead of the
whole hand for the purpose then in view, i.e. for securing a signature
which the writer would obviously hesitate to disown. That he might be
infallibly convicted of perjury, if he did, is a very different matter.
That was not settled, and could not have been settled, to the
satisfaction of Courts of Justice, till, after many years, abundant
agreement had been reached among ordinary people. The very possibility
of such a 'sanction' (to use a technical expression) to the use of a
finger-print did not dawn upon me till after long experience, and even
then it became no more than a personal conviction for many years more.
The decisiveness of a finger-print is now one of the most powerful aids
to Justice. Our possession of it derives from the impression of
K[=o]n[=a]i's hand in 1858.

  [2] 'Finger-prints' (Macmillan, 1892), p. 26.

  [3] See Appendix.

Of trials with my own fingers the oldest impression I possess was taken
in June 1859, when I first began to keep records. I had been transferred
to be Magistrate of Arrah, the most north-westerly district of Bengal,
where the Mutiny still left work to do which allowed little time for
private hobbies; but I took so many prints among the society of the
Station, as well as among Indians of all classes, that my 'fad' about
them was well known. The Medical Officer of Arrah was Dr. R. F.
Hutchinson, who naturally took great interest in the subject. Twenty-one
years later, in 1880, he was still there, and sent me a 'repeat' print
of his fingers. Here is a facsimile of his first Arrah impression. In
1890, being in England, he visited Galton's Laboratory, and gave a
second repeat (after thirty-one years) which was used in 'Finger-prints'
(1892), p. 93, to support Mr. Galton's evidence of 'Persistency'. In the
facsimile 'Collection 1858-1913', which I am attaching to some of the
copies of this narrative, will be found other prints which I took at
Arrah of my whole hand and of my right foot. They agree irresistibly
with prints taken now after an interval of fifty-seven years.

    [Illustration: KONAI'S HAND Bengal 1858]

    [Illustration: Contract for 2,000 maunds of road-metalling,
    between W. J. Herschel and Rajyadhar Konai, in Konai's
    handwriting]

In 1860 I was sent as Magistrate to Nuddea, nearer to Calcutta. The
Indigo disturbances in the district had given rise to a great deal of
violence, litigation, and fraud; forgery and perjury were rampant. The
rent-rolls of the ryots put into Court by the Zemindars; the pottahs
(agreements for rent) purporting to be issued by them to each ryot, put
in by the latter; the kabooliyats (acceptances) purporting to be signed
by the ryot, and tendered in evidence against him; all these documents
were frequently worth no more than the paper on which they were written.
In my own jail a notorious convict was found making clay seals of
well-known landlords, and forging their signatures on pottahs smuggled
into his hands. He was detected by the colour of the floor of his cell,
where he kept his stock-in-trade buried. Things were so bad in this and
other ways that the administration of Civil Justice had unusual
difficulty in preserving its dignity. I was driven to take up
finger-prints now with a definite object before me, and for three years
continued taking a very large number from all sorts and conditions of
men. I give here some selected impressions of friends taken in Nuddea
during the years 1860, 1861, and 1862, in order of date, and names of
some others.

    [Illustration: R. F. Hutchinson, June 1859, Medical Officer at
    Arrah Station.]

1860, July. Claude Brown, a prominent merchant of Calcutta, who was
making a tour in the Indigo districts, and was at the time my guest.

1860, July 29. Captain H. Raban, Head of the Bengal Police, sent to
Nuddea on account of its disturbed state; also my guest. He took extreme
interest in the evidence of his own imprint. It was my habit, of course,
to give duplicates of his 'mark' to every one of importance.

    [Illustration: Captain H. Raban, Head of the Police in Lower
    Bengal, July 29, 1860.]

1860, July 31. W. Waterfield, B.C.S., a college friend, afterwards
Comptroller-General of the Treasuries of India. I have several 'repeats'
of his; see especially p. 29.

1861, June 24. Ogilvie Temple, Judge of the Court of Small Causes,
Kooshtea.

1862, April 13. At a gathering at my house at Kishnagar I had the good
fortune to secure the prints of many other notables of the district.

The Mah[=a]r[=a]j[=a] of Nuddea. He was the highest of the old nobility
of Bengal. He was much struck, as I was, by the remarkable symmetry of
the 'pattern' on one of his fingers at the core.

    [Illustration:
    April 13, 1862. Mah[=a]r[=a]j[=a] of Nuddea.
    Enlarged for the remarkable pattern]

    [Illustration:
    April 13, 1862. A. C. Howard.
    July 20, 1908. Sir Charles Howard.]

Same day. E. Grey, B.C.S. A college friend, on my staff, afterwards
Civil and Sessions Judge. He, I am happy to say, is still alive (1916),
and his 'repeat' is quite good now.

Same day. A. C. Howard, District Superintendent of Police, Nuddea,
afterwards Assistant Commissioner at Scotland Yard, and knighted for his
services there, as Sir Charles Howard. He gladly gave me a 'repeat' in
London after forty-six years. It will be seen how good the persistence
has been.

Same day. Three other Assistant Magistrates on the unusually large staff
of the district. Among these was F. K. Hewitt, B.C.S., afterwards
Commissioner of Chota Nagpur. Twenty-six years later, at my request, he
furnished Sir Francis Galton with the 'repeat' printed on p. 93 of his
famous work 'Finger-prints' (Macmillan, 1892). I have much later repeats
taken at Oxford.

Same day. Ninian H. Thomson, Judge of the Court of Small Causes. He
kindly sent me a repeat twenty-eight years later from Florence, and this
also appears in the same work, p. 93.

Very early in my experiments I entertained misgivings about the
possibility of the impressions being forged by the professional
criminals whom we had so much reason to fear. I therefore submitted some
specimens to the best artists in Calcutta to imitate. Their failure
sufficed to dispel all anxiety on that point. None of them come near
Bewick's engravings in accuracy.

Before I left Kishnagar (Nuddea) the violence of the Indigo disturbances
had been subdued, but the Courts became choked with suits for
enhancement of rent upon the recalcitrant cultivators, and the sore
point about the genuineness of leases, &c., became aggravated. I took
courage from despair, and in my judicial capacity (if I remember right)
addressed an official letter to the Government of Bengal, definitely
advocating administrative action to enforce the use of 'finger-prints'
by both parties as necessary to the validity of these documents.
Unfortunately I kept no private draft of this letter, and have lost the
date, probably 1862 or 1863. It must, however, be on record, both in
Nuddea and in the Calcutta Secretariat. Nothing came of it, and I took
no more pains about it. But a few years ago I was pleasantly reminded by
Mr. Horace Cockerell, for some time Secretary to the Government, who
gave me the history of its reception, viz. that it had been deemed
inadvisable, when things were quieting down, to raise a new controversy
of the sort. He added that it was a matter of regret now, that no action
whatever had been taken, but he pointed out that legislation would have
been necessary to make the new marks admissible in evidence, and to get
such a law on the spur of the moment would have been hopeless. That
difficulty had certainly never occurred to me when I made the
suggestion. But how weighty an objection it was is shown by the fact
that it was long, even after the value of finger-prints had been
established in practice, before the High Court of Calcutta, in a leading
case, declared that the evidence could not be excluded, nay more, that
it was cogent. This was many years before such a case in England. At the
time I wrote it is quite certain that no Court in India, no pleader, no
solicitor had ever recognized such signatures as these.

In 1863 I took my first furlough to England, which changed the current
of my thoughts. But I found that my own people had been more interested
than I had supposed by my correspondence on the subject. Among my
brother Alexander's papers was found after his death a letter telling
him my ideas, and asking him to devise a roller of some sort, for
oil-ink, better than my soft office pads.

During that and later furloughs I took no public steps about the
subject. In society, of course, it was looked on simply as a hobby,
attracting no more serious attention than did Bewick's fancy for
engraving his thumb-mark in his day. But the warm interest shown by my
own people, who had known my early troubles in India, determined me,
during my last furlough, that before completing my service I would give
the thing an open official trial on my own responsibility. I sailed,
1877, in the P. and O. steamer 'Mongolia', Captain Coleman, with my
sister, now Mrs. Maclear, who was an enthusiast on my side. We roused
attention enough on board in the Indian Ocean to obtain the
finger-prints of the Captain and many of his officers, stewards, and
kal[=a]shis; also of many of the passengers, among whom I may especially
mention Sir Alfred and Lady Lyall (as they afterwards became), Colonel
Garrow Waterfield, and Colonel Chermside. Some thirty years later, 1908,
Sir A. Lyall permitted me to take and use his repeat impression. Here
are facsimiles of both, and also of Captain Coleman's, the pattern of
which was thought then to deserve enlargement. Friendship, which for
family reasons sprang up between Colonel Garrow Waterfield and myself,
led him to take special interest in my project, and I cannot doubt that
he carried that with him to the Punjab, where his reputation was high.
Most of the other saloon passengers were business men on their way back
to the Far East, and left us at Ceylon. If any one of them had heard of
the use of these marks, say in China, I could not but have been told of
it. But there was not a breath of the sort. I give here a list of the
remaining signatures still in my possession, in case any may meet with
recognition: F. Slight, Officer of the 'Mongolia', F. A. Owen, J.
Watson, R. Hawkins, F. Wingrove, O. Westphal, J. W. Malet, G. S. Lynch,
Mrs. Philip. It is only reasonable, I think, to believe that such a
novel and evidently useful idea would have spread by their means
wherever they went. My exhibition was frequently asked for, and I always
gave a duplicate of his mark to each person, and sometimes added one of
my own to show the extraordinary persistence of patterns after nigh
twenty years.

    [Illustration:
    Sir A. C. Lyall. 1877.
    Sir Alfred C. Lyall, May 15, 1908.]

    [Illustration:
    Capt. A. Coleman (P. & O. SS. 'Mongolia'), February, 1877.
    Enlargements by eye.]

On my return to India, my position as Magistrate and Collector at
Hooghly, near Calcutta, gave me the control, not only of criminal
courts, but of the jail, and of the modern Department for Registration
of Deeds of all sorts, and among minor duties the payment of Government
pensions. Registration, of course, appealed most strongly to my desires,
but the Sub-Registrar and his clerks had to be trained, and meanwhile
the few pensioners enabled me to break the ice myself. I was not a
little anxious lest, officially introduced, Hindus might take alarm for
their caste. The memory of the greased cartridges of the Mutiny, so near
Hooghly, was indelible. In private experiments I had never met any such
difficulty, but the old lesson had been a severe one, and I thought it
well, when acting officially, to take every precaution. I was careful,
therefore, from the first ostentatiously to employ Hindus to take the
impressions wanted; using, as if a matter of course, the pad and the ink
made by one of themselves from the very seed-oil and lamp-black which
were in constant use for the office seals in the several departments.

The glad approval of the pensioners was a great pleasure to me, and made
the other registration work astonishingly easy. The clerks took to it
unhesitatingly, and enjoyed the fun of explaining the 'Sahib's hikmat'.
No one ever hesitated to do as he was told, or to take away duplicates
for talk at home. The process of registration at that time was regulated
by a late law devised to afford the best security then possible for the
genuineness of deeds, as far as attestation went. The signatures,
whether in full or by caste mark, or by cross, or, in the case of women
mostly, by touching the paper with the tip of the finger wetted with ink
from the clerk's pen (see p. 35), were always made in the presence and
under the eye of the Registrar, who, in most cases, had to rely on the
sworn evidence of witnesses attesting their personal knowledge of the
executant. The Registrar was, of course, responsible for using his
intelligence in each case to prevent imposture. His part of the work was
never impeached, that I know, in Bengal; nevertheless, fraudulent
attempts did still come to light. Signatures were still denied;
personations in presenting false deeds did take place, either to
swindle, or, in one case, to fabricate an alibi. As long as I was at
Hooghly I was quite satisfied that no will or other deed registered
there with the new safeguard would ever be repudiated by the actual
executant. I have had to think otherwise since then, because many years
afterwards a man (in another district) who had given his finger-print
before a Registrar repudiated it. He was summoned to give his evidence
on oath. It was found that he had cut off the joints of his fingers,
hoping to defeat justice by corrupting the witnesses so as to prove that
he was _not_ the man they had recognized before the Registrar. The High
Court rejected the sworn story of an accident, and confirmed the facts
of the registration, with the necessary consequence to the offender for
his perjury. I do not know of any other repudiation having been pressed
to this bitter end in India or elsewhere. The contrast between the
inherent weakness of the old law and the efficiency of the new test
could not be better exemplified. This case gave the first stern blow to
the foul mischief that had developed such cruel proportions in India
under cover of our conservative legal habits.

The way the new safeguard was applied at Hooghly in 1877 was
thus:--After the legal formalities of registration had been observed,
the Registrar made the person print his two fingers on the deed, and
again in a diary book which was kept by him in the office, for my own
inspection rather than as evidence. It is, no doubt, preserved at
Hooghly still.

It was from this book that cuttings were made at my request in 1892 by
Mr. Duke, the magistrate, which formed the subject of Sir Francis
Galton's volume on 'Blurred Finger-prints' (1893), to which, for its
cogency in marshalling the evidence, I must refer my readers. I annex a
tracing of one of his enlargements, by permission of the London
University, to which he left his great collection.

    [Illustration: Bech[=a] R[=a]m D[=a]s Adhik[=a]ri. From tracings
    by Mr. Galton of enlargements,
      (_a_) Made in 1877 when registering his deed;
      (_b_) made in 1892 for Mr. Galton.]

Another form in which I made use of the new system for public purposes
was in the jail. The common device of hiring a substitute to serve out a
term was not unknown, but it involved a long risk of detection. A safer
but very costly, and therefore rare, device was sham death and a
purchased corpse, affording comparative safety after escape. A case of
this kind, carried out with the aid of an irregularly appointed doctor,
was strongly suspected by me at Hooghly.[4] The precaution I adopted
was to take the finger-prints of each offender when passing sentence of
imprisonment, both on the records of the Court and also on the warrant
to the jailer.

  [4] I had him dismissed soon after for a different offence.

All these processes were in full use when I left India, on the
completion of twenty-five years' service, in 1878. I was by that time
almost broken down in health, and more so in energy. Sir Ashley Eden,
the Lieutenant-Governor, offered me a substantive Commissionership. I
had already held such an appointment twice, and nothing but an honest
sense of inability made me decline it now. I mention this in explanation
of the slackness on my part, but for which the finger-print system would
certainly have been put in force in the Registration Department, at
least throughout Bengal, forty years ago. As it was, I only tried to
induce the Inspector of Jails and the Registrar-General of the day to
give the system a trial. Fortunately I kept an office copy of this
letter, which, in reply to outside criticism, I published in 'Nature',
Nov. 22, 1894, and repeat here to complete this narrative.


(TRUE COPY OF OFFICE COPY.)

                                     HOOGHLY, _August 15, 1877_.

    MY DEAR B----, --I enclose a paper which looks unusual,
    but which I hope has some value. It exhibits a method of
    identification of persons, which, with ordinary care in
    execution, and with judicial care in the scrutiny, is, I can
    now say, for all practical purposes far more infallible than
    photography. It consists in taking a seal-like impression,
    in common seal ink, of the markings on the skin of the two
    forefingers of the right hand (these two being taken for
    convenience only).

    I am able to say that these marks do not (bar accidents) change
    in the course of ten or fifteen years so much as to affect the
    utility of the test.

    The process of taking the impression is hardly more difficult
    than that of making a fair stamp of an office seal. I have been
    trying it in the Jail and in the Registering Office and among
    pensioners here for some months past. I have purposely taken no
    particular pains in explaining the process, beyond once showing
    how it is done, and once or twice visiting the office,
    inspecting the signatures,[5] and asking the _omlah_[6] to be
    a little more careful. The articles necessary are such as the
    _daftari_[7] can prepare on a mere verbal explanation.

    Every person who now registers a document at Hooghly has to sign
    his 'sign-manual'. None has offered the smallest objection, and
    I believe that the practice, if generally adopted, will put an
    end to all attempts at personation.

    The cogency of the evidence is admitted by every one who takes
    the trouble to compare a few signatures together, and to try
    making a few himself. I have taken thousands now in the course
    of the last twenty years, and (bar smudges and accidents, which
    are rarely bad enough to be fatal) I am prepared to answer for
    the identity of every person whose 'sign-manual' I can now
    produce if I am confronted with him.

    As an instance of the value of the thing, I might suggest that
    if Roger Tichborne had given his 'sign-manual' on entering the
    Army on any register, the whole Orton case would have been
    knocked on the head in ten minutes by requiring Orton to make
    his sign-manual alongside it for comparison.

    I send this specimen to you because I believe that
    identification is by no means the unnecessary thing in jails
    which one might presume it should be. I don't think I need
    dilate on that point. Here is the means of verifying the
    identity of every man in jail with the man sentenced by the
    court, at any moment, day or night. Call the number up and make
    him sign. If it is he, it is he; if not, he is exposed on the
    spot. Is No. 1302 really dead, and is that his corpse or a sham
    one? The corpse has two fingers that will answer the question
    at once. Is this man brought into jail the real Simon Pure
    sentenced by the magistrate? The sign-manual on the back of the
    magistrate's warrant is there to testify, &c.

    For uses in other departments and transactions, especially among
    illiterate people, it is available with such ease that I quite
    think its general use would be a substantial contribution
    towards public morality. Now that it is pretty well known
    here, I do not believe the man lives who would dare to attempt
    personation before the Registrar here. The mukhtears[8] all
    know the potency of the evidence too well.

    Will you kindly give the matter a little patient attention, and
    then let me ask whether you would let me try it in other jails?

    The impressions will, I doubt not, explain themselves to
    you without more words. I will say that perhaps in a small
    proportion of the cases that might come to question the study
    of the seals by an expert might be advisable, but that in most
    cases any man of judgement giving his attention to it cannot
    fail to pronounce right. I have never seen any two signatures
    about which I remained in doubt after sufficient care.

    Kindly keep the specimens carefully.

                                        Yours sincerely,
                                                    W. HERSCHEL.

  [5] The words 'signature', 'sign-manual', 'seal', were used
      indifferently in this letter for 'finger-print'.

  [6] Clerks.

  [7] Man in charge of stationery.

  [8] Solicitors.

I received one answer, but its tenor was not so encouraging as I had
hoped. I was out of heart, and did not press my request.

How much all this was regretted afterwards by others I must in simple
justice record. It came about so quietly and so honourably that it is
only now that I feel myself free to say publicly how deeply I was
touched. My first substantive Commissionership had been given me by Sir
George Campbell, to whose house I was not long after brought back in a
dying condition from malarial fever. Sir George and his private
secretary, Mr. Luttman Johnson, took us, my wife and myself, into the
tenderest care. Years afterwards, in 1906, the latter befriended me in
the kindliest manner at the annual I.C.S. garden-party, which I but
rarely attended, and invited me to dine with him that evening. It was a
party of seven or eight, and the next to arrive were Sir James and Lady
Bourdillon. His name, when our host introduced us, I only recognized as
lately Acting Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal. To my great surprise,
before our hands parted, he told me how often he had wished to meet me,
to express his constant regret at having let my suggestion slip through
his hands when he was Registrar-General. He remembered my letter well,
and had indeed taken action by inquiry concerning my doings in his
department, but for some reason he had lost sight of the matter.
Needless to say, we became the firmest of friends on the spot, and I had
the pleasure of a visit from him afterwards at Oxford. It is some years
now since he and Mr. Luttman Johnson died. None of us, as far as I know,
has ever spoken of this fine act of Sir James's except in strict
privacy.

The Inspector of Jails of 1877, Mr. Beverley, afterwards a judge in the
High Court of Bengal, is still alive. Writing in 1906, he says,
regretfully, 'I have no recollection of writing the letter you refer to,
but I know that, both as Registrar-General and as Inspector of Jails, I
took great interest in the Finger-print system of identification, of
which I always regarded you as the Apostle in India'. He too came to see
me at Oxford after that, with one of his successors in the High Court.

I shall say more farther on in regard to my statement in this 1877
letter that 'these marks do not change in the course of ten or fifteen
years'.

During my stay at Hooghly, so near Calcutta, I saw more society in my
own house than in other stations, and interested my friends with the
novelty of finger-printing. I give a few of their names to which special
interest attaches.

Among Indian gentlemen, whose prints were taken at Hooghly in 1877, I do
not know who are still living; I can only give the names of

  (1) B[=a]bu Dinon[=a]th P[=a]l, of Hooghly;
  (2) B[=a]bu Lalit Mohun Singh, of Sibpur;
  (3) B[=a]bu Upendra N[=a]r[=a]yan Nandi, of Sh[=a]h[=a]ganj.

Of English friends still living I am allowed to reproduce the print of
1877, and its repeat in 1913, of Mr. Frank Courthope, well known in
Sussex and in banking circles in London, (next page).

The next is remarkable. Captain V. H. Haggard, R.N., was a child of
2-3/4 years old at Hooghly, 1877. By much ingratiation I succeeded in
getting a print of his whole hand, and another of three fingers. In
1913, when on special duty in H.M.S. 'President', he kindly gave me (not
for the first time) a repeat, this time at the age of 38. The baby print
bears enlargement beautifully, and I am sure my readers will be
delighted with the comparison I am thus able to lay before them.

    [Illustration: CAPTAIN V. H. HAGGARD, R. N.
      1877 aet. 2-3/4
      r. 3 1877 (magnified)
      Repeat 1913 (magnified)]

    [Illustration: W. F. Courthope.
      r. 1 At Hooghly, 1877.
      r. 1 r. 2 Oct. 21, 1913.
      r. 2 At Hooghly, 1877.]

One of the prints I value most, on personal grounds, is that of Sir
Theodore Hope, at that time in the Legislative Council of India for
Bombay. I grieve to say he has died since these words were written. He
was one of my most honoured college friends in the old Haileybury days
of 1853.

Among the last prints that I took in India were two at Mussoorie, in the
Punjab Him[=a]layas, in Sept. 1877; one of my brother Colonel J.
Herschel, R.E., and one of Dr. J. F. Duthie, of the Forest Department.
They are both living still, and their repeats to-day are quite good.

To return now to my letter of 1877. I was 'able to say that these marks
do not change in the course of ten or fifteen years'. I might have said
eighteen years, for my own marks reached back to 1859; but I was
steering for safety.

The conviction of the unchanging character of finger-patterns had,
of course, grown on me only by degrees, as the evidence of time
accumulated. Among my friends, from Nuddea days onwards, I often took
second impressions, invariably drawing attention to their identity with
the former ones. I never came upon any sign of change, bar accident. But
such comparisons were generally limited to intervals of no more than two
or three years, owing to the frequent changes of residence incidental to
Indian service. As time went on it was chiefly the incessant evidence of
my own ten fingers, and of my whole hand, which wrought in me the
overwhelming conviction that the lines on the skin persisted
indefinitely.

    [Illustration: Colonel J. Herschel, Sept. 22, 1877.]

    [Illustration: J. F. Duthie, 1877.]

But besides my own evidence of eighteen years, I had that of my oldest
college friend, William Waterfield, of almost as long. On March 31,
1877, he and Mr. (afterwards Sir Theodore) Hope and Mrs. Hope were my
guests at Hooghly. I took all their impressions and my own on that day,
noting on Waterfield's that we compared it with his earliest print of
1860, in Nuddea, seventeen years earlier. We found the agreement, of
course, complete. Here are the facsimiles.

    [Illustration: T. C. Hope, Bo.C.S., at Hooghly, 1877.]

    [Illustration: W. Waterfield
      July 31, 1860, Nuddea.
      March 31, 1877, Hooghly.]

If more evidence were required, I was prepared, without hesitation,
to call on any person whose mark I had taken since I began. It was in
fact from among those very persons, Natives as well as English, that
thirteen years later, at Mr. Galton's request, I obtained the repeats
which, by their much longer persistence then, went so far to prove his
case to universal conviction.

I close this record with a comparison between three of my own prints,
taken, one in 1859, one in 1877, and the last to-day, after fifty-seven
years. For length of persistence they cannot at present be matched.

    [Illustration:
      (_a_) (_b_) W. J. H., 1859, Arrah (aet. 26).
      (_c_) W. J. H., March 31, 1877 (aet. 44).
      (_d_) W. J. H., February 22, 1916 (aet. 83).]

It goes beyond the proper scope of this narrative, but I cannot refrain
from offering my readers here a striking instance of the almost
incredible persistency of atomic renovation that takes place in the pads
of our fingers, in spite of their being more subject to wear than any
other part of the body. The first was taken at the age of 7-3/4; the
next, for Mr. Galton, nine years later. In 1913 my son was in Canada
when I asked him to send me several repeats. Every print showed the
minute tell-tale dot which Mr. Galton's sharp eye had noticed twenty-two
years before. No doubt it was a natal mark. It has anyhow already
persisted for thirty-two years.

    [Illustration: A. E. H. Herschel, r. 3.
      1881, aet. 7-3/4.
      1890, aet. 17.
      1913, aet. 40.]




APPENDIX


When I speak of the 'discovery' of finger-prints nigh sixty years ago, I
should wish to be understood correctly. I cannot say that I thought of
it as such until Mr. Galton examined old records in search of earlier
notices of the subject. What he found had been beyond my ken, and I
never inquired for myself. The fascination of experiments and the
impelling object of them were all I cared about. Had it been otherwise I
should have had an open field for egoism to any extent, for no one
questioned the novelty of the thing.

The time that has elapsed since Galton's inquiries, without any material
addition to his ascertained facts, justifies me, I venture to think, in
speaking of my work as the 'discovery' of the value of finger-prints.

I proceed to show what has been brought to light from other sources.


Bewick.

Of modern cases the first known is that of Thomas Bewick. He was a
wood-engraver, as well as an author, and had a fancy for engraving his
finger-mark. He printed, as far as I can ascertain, only three
specimens, by way of ornament to his books.

1. 1809. 'British Birds', p. 190. The impression of the finger appears
as if obliterating a small scene of a cottage, trees, and a rider, but
the paper between the lines of the finger is almost all clean.

2. 1818. The 'Receipt'; of which, by Mr. Quaritch's favour, I possess
one. This is, beyond all possibility of doubt, quite free from any
tooling. How it was transferred to paper in those days (of which there
is an indication) I am unable to say, but for his purposes it was an
original 'finger-print' of Thomas Bewick. Even the fine half-tone
process of this facsimile cannot reproduce its delicacy.

    [Illustration: Thomas Bewick his mark]

3. 1826. Memorial Edition of Bewick's Works, 1885, on the last page of
the last volume, under a letter dated 1826, in which he rates some one
for copying his woodcuts. When I saw it at the British Museum some years
ago I thought it showed toolwork.

These three seem to be all the specimens now available, and they are
from three different fingers, of which two are certified to be his own.

Gathering that Mr. Quaritch was exceptionally familiar with Bewick's
life, I told him that I wished to leave no stone unturned to do ample
justice to him, if he was known to have done anything more than appears
above. Mr. Quaritch took the matter up very kindly, and finally informed
me that he had been unable to trace any writing of Bewick's concerning
these prints. There seems, therefore, no evidence that he ever took
impressions of any finger but his own. Now it is true that no one of
observant habits, and least of all an engraver, could fail to perceive
the peculiarities of his own finger. The brick-makers of Babylon and
Egypt, and every printer since fingers were dirtied by printer's ink,
must have noticed them. But it is a long step from that to a study of
other men's marks, with a view to identification. What Bewick certainly
did do might easily have led him to such a study, but it looks as if he
was satisfied with recognizing his own mark.

Remembering, as I have already said, how one of his marks had struck my
fancy as a boy, I am disposed to believe that, all unwittingly, I was
guided to seize upon a thread which Bewick had let fall.


Purkinje.

Five years after Bewick, Johannes Purkinje, of Breslau, in 1823, read an
essay which has been found and examined by Mr. Galton, and partly
translated on p. 85 of his 1892 work. Purkinje carried his study of the
patterns on fingers beyond all comparison with Bewick's use of them, of
whose existence indeed he could hardly have been aware. He worked hard
on them for a scientific (medical) purpose. It seemed to me strange
that, going so far as he did, he had not hit upon our idea. To satisfy
myself I read his work through in 1909. The very last sentence in it
seemed to strike a light. Referring to 'the varieties of the tonsils,
and especially of the papillae of the tongue, in different individuals'
(no mention of fingers), he finishes the sentence and his essay by
saying: 'from all which [varieties] sound materials will be furnished
for that individual knowledge of the man which is of no less importance
than a general knowledge of him is, especially in the practice of
medicine.' A fine conclusion indeed, and a stimulating; but no part of
his essay conveys an inkling of identification by means of any of the
individual varieties on which he always lays stress, not even his
pioneer work in the classification of the markings on fingers.

    [Illustration: A _tep-sai_ of Bengal.]

    [Illustration: A finger-print.]

    [Illustration: THE TOKEN-SIGNATURES OF THOSE WHO CANNOT WRITE OR
    READ, IN SEVERAL CASTES. YEAR 1865. DATE 8 FEBRUARY.

    1. Cultivator; a harrow. 2. Barber; a mirror. 3. Shop-keeper;
    scales. 4. Carpenter; a chisel. 5. A Washerman's board. 6.
    Female; a bracelet. 7. Widow; a spindle. 8. Caste uncertain;
    scissors. 9. Family Priest; an almanac roll.]


Bengal.

The common way for illiterates to sign is to wet the tip of one finger
with ink from a pen, and then touch the document (leaving a small black
blot) where we touch a wafer. The mark so made is called '_tep-sai_',
'tep' meaning 'pressure' by touch or grip, and 'sai' meaning 'token'
(I do not know the etymology). I ask my readers now to compare the
'_tep-sai_' with the 'finger-print' alongside it, and to say whether the
_tep-sai_ could afford any means of identification by comparison with
another blot from the same finger. Illiterates who can hold a pen make a
cross, as we do, called '_dhera-sai_'; others, more ambitious, indicate
their caste by symbols. For the interest of the thing I give some
tracings from a collection of such caste-marks which I had made for this
purpose when I was Magistrate of Midnapore in 1865.

When I was introducing actual registration I asked the principal member
of my Bar to give me his opinion about the new marks. His answer was as
follows (the English is of course his own):

                                                      Hooghly,
                                                  The 21st Aug./77.

    DEAR SIR,

    I have examined the impressions made in these papers, and I
    think each can be distinguished from the others. There are also
    so many peculiarities in each impression that it cannot be
    forged, and I think it would be a preventive to forgery if all
    documents, specially by females, or males who do not know to
    read or write, would contain impressions by fingers.

                                          Yours faithfully,
                                                ESHAN CHUNDRA MITRA.

I value this letter highly, for Eshan Chundra was Government Pleader at
Hooghly, and in frequent request in Calcutta. No native lawyer of his
large practice could have written thus if he had ever known of this
method of signature before.

Trustworthy information in my hands is to the effect that attestations
by the finger in China are like Bengali _tep-sais_, and nothing more.


China.

The nearest approach to our use of finger-prints that I have found in
China came to hand thus:

An Oxford friend, Mr. Bullock, subsequently elected Professor of
Chinese, had been interpreter to the Legation in Peking. Talking with
him about the methods of signing deeds in China, he told me that the
finger-tip (not finger-print) method was in ordinary use, but he was
careful to point out also that to his knowledge ever since he went to
Peking, about 1868, Chinese bankers had been in the habit of impressing
their thumbs on the notes they issued; and he had no doubt the custom
was much older than that. This was startling, but he kindly procured for
me the bank-note which I here show in facsimile; with it came this
explanation of such thumb-marks, given by his friend in China:

'They are imprinted partly on the counterfoil and partly on the note
itself, so that when presented its genuineness can be tested at once.'

That is, they play the part of what is technically called the 'scroll'
in our cheques.

    [Illustration: A CHINESE BANK NOTE, 1898]

My readers may accept it that the ink used was the same Indian ink with
which the Chinese characters on the note were written. That is the
unhesitating judgement of such an expert as Mr. Galton, who examined it.
The difference between a water ink and printer's ink for identification
is enormous. Blood on the fingers has occasionally left impressions that
fortunately sufficed to reveal the murderer; but, as a rule, wet fingers
leave only smudges as useless as this one. It is quite certain,
therefore, that no one in the habit of impressing his thumb-mark as this
banker did, would use water ink, if he depended on recognizing it as his
own. In short, the smudge on the bank-note was placed there in order to
identify the two parts of a piece of paper after severance, not to prove
who placed it so. My readers may see what exquisite delicacy of detail
can be obtained by printer's ink, when so desired, if they will examine
a fine skin impression with a magnifying-glass; even the pores along the
ridges can be seen as white dots. For practical purposes, however, such
extreme delicacy as this is not needed.

This difference of ink suggests a further remark. The Chinese have used
printer's ink for ages. If they aimed at identification they would
surely have discovered its great value for clear impressions, and its
use could never have died out. On the other hand, a method of
identification depending on water ink could never have survived for such
strict work as our finger-prints. On the palm of the hand it can give a
fairly good impression for such simple identification as is wanted
(say) for passports, because the large creases will obviously be those
of the bearer of the passport, or as obviously not. These lines of the
palm, so well known in palmistry, are as clear to a man as the shape of
his hand, while those on the pads of his own fingers are scarcely
noticed even now by one man in a million. The science of identification
by means of the pads cannot, in my opinion, date farther back than 1858,
when I happened to use oil-ink, which was not used for _tep-sais_.

The ablest defence of the claims of antiquity that I have seen is by a
Japanese writer, Kumagusu Minakata, whose letter to 'Nature', Dec. 27,
1894, appears to be as exhaustive as it is able; but I hope that this
paper will satisfy him that the finger-print system of our day has no
connexion with the methods he describes. The 'nail-marks' of which he
speaks must be utterly useless for identification; yet he treats all
manner of impressions alike, and tells us indeed that they are all known
by the one name of 'hand-mark'. I fear that he has failed, like some
other writers,[9] to see the definite force of the word 'identification'
in the finger-print system. It means that if a man can be indicated
whose finger-print agrees with that on a document, he is identified with
the man who put that one there. That is all we want. But it will be seen
that there must be two impressions at least, that will bear comparison,
to constitute 'identification'.

  [9] I include a too brief notice of the subject by Professor Giles
      of Cambridge, in his recent work 'Civilization of China', p. 118,
      and an article in the 'Nineteenth Century' of December 1904.

None of the writers who have undertaken the defence appears to perceive
this need of a second impression if the issue of identity turns on any
kind of finger-mark. Repudiations cannot have been rare; tribunals must
occasionally have been invoked; yet no instance is quoted of decision by
demand for a second impression.

It seems then that these marks were not made, as ours are, expressly to
challenge comparison; that, in fact, they offer no points for
comparison.

In conclusion, it is hard to believe that a system so practically useful
as this could have been known in the great lands of the East for
generations past, without arresting the notice of Western statesmen,
merchants, travellers, and students. Yet the knowledge never reached us.


                                FINIS.





End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Origin of Finger-Printing, by 
William J. Herschel

*** 