After a little practice, experience will suggest many methods of examination and test not dealt with here. For example, photographic enlargements can be and are utilised with great advantage by bringing out minute details, especially in signatures, erasures and alterations. Interesting experiments can be made with a view to discovering the effect of different kinds of ink—important in settling the question whether the whole of a particular writing was done with one fluid, and at the same time, or at intervals.
The study of erasures and alterations of figures or characters also comes within the scope of developments of the art which it is not deemed necessary to deal with at length in these pages, for after experience will suggest their use and the best methods of procedure. For the beginner the instructions given in the chapters that follow will be found amply sufficient to direct him how to take up a fascinating and practical accomplishment, and this, with no further aid than his own judgment, perseverance and powers of observation and deduction.
CHAPTER I.
The Principles of Handwriting Analysis.
The principle on which experts claim to be able to detect variations and to differentiate between handwritings is based on the well-established axiom that there is no such thing as a perfect pair in nature; that, however close the apparent similarity between two things, a careful examination and comparison will reveal marked differences to those trained to detect them.
This is especially true of everything that is produced by human agency. Everyone knows how difficult it is to keep check upon and eradicate certain physical habits, such as gestures, style of walking, moving the hands, arms, &c., tricks of speech, or tone of voice. These mannerisms, being mechanical and automatic, or the result of long habit, are performed unconsciously, and there is probably no person who is entirely free from some marked peculiarity of manner, which he is ignorant of possessing. It is a well-known fact that the subject of caricature or mimicry rarely admits the accuracy or justness of the imitation, although the peculiarities so emphasised are plainly apparent to others. Even actors, who are supposed to make a careful study of their every tone and gesture, are constantly criticised for faults or mannerisms plain to the observer, but undetected by themselves.
It is easy, therefore, to understand how a trick or a gesture may become a fixed and unconscious habit through long custom, especially when, as in the case of a peculiarity of style in handwriting, there has been neither criticism on it, nor special reason for abandoning it.
Every person whose handwriting is developed and permanently formed has adopted certain more or less distinctive peculiarities in the formation of letters of which he is generally unaware.