[Plate 13] gives impressions taken from the fingers of a child of 2½ years in 1877, and again in 1890, when a boy of 15. They are enlarged photographically to the same size, and are therefore on different scales. The impressions from the baby-hand are not sharp, but sufficiently distinct for comparison. Every bifurcation, and beginning or ending of a ridge, common to the two impressions, is marked with a numeral in blue ink. There is only one island in the present instance, and that is in the upper pair of prints; it is clearly seen in the right hand print, lying to the left of the inscribed number 13, but the badness of the left hand print makes it hardly decipherable, so it is not numbered. There are a total of twenty-six good points of comparison common to the upper pair of prints; there are forty-three points in the lower pair, forty-two of which appear in both, leaving a single point of disagreement; it is marked A on the fifth ridge counting from the top. Here a bifurcated ridge in the baby is filled up in the boy. This one exception, small though it be, is in my experience unique. The total result of the two pairs of prints is to afford sixty-eight successes and one failure. The student will find it well worth his while to study these and the following prints step by step, to satisfy himself of the extraordinarily exact coincidences between the two members of either of the pairs. Of course the patterns generally must be the same, if the ridges composing them are exactly alike, and the most cursory glance shows them to be so.
PLATE 14.
Fig. 21.
| 1881 1 AEEH | 1r 1890 | 1862 5 FKH | 1r 1888 | |
| 1881 2 AEEH | 3r 1890 | 1859 6 RFH | 2r 1890 | |
| 1862 3 NHT | 1890 | 1860 7 WJH | thumb 1890 | |
| 1862 4 NHT | 2r 1890 | 1859 8 WJH | 3r 1890 |
[Plate 14], Fig. 21 contains rather less than a quarter of each of eight pairs that were published in the Phil. Trans. memoir above alluded to. They were there enlarged photographically to twice their natural size, which was hardly enough, as it did not allow sufficient space for inserting the necessary reference numbers. Consequently they have been again considerably enlarged, so much so that it is impossible to put more than a portion of each on the page. However, what is given suffices. The omitted portions may be studied in the memoir. The cases of 1 and 2 are prints of different fingers of the same individual, first as a child 8 years old, and then as a boy of 17. They have been enlarged on the same scale but not to the same size; so the print of the child includes a larger proportion of the original impression than that of the boy. It is therefore only a part of the child’s print which is comparable with that of the boy. The remaining six cases refer to four different men, belonging to three quite different families, although their surnames happen to have the same initial, H. They were adults when the first print was made, and from 26 to 31 years older on the second occasion. There is an exact agreement throughout between the two members of each of the eight several couplets.
In the pair 2. A. E. H. Hl., there is an interesting dot at the point 4 (being an island it deserved to have had two numbers, one for the beginning and one for the end). Small as it is, it persists; its growth in size corresponding to the growth of the child in stature.
PLATE 15.
Fig. 22.