Finger Prints

by Francis Galton

Were it the custom for persons about to travel to ask for prints of their fingers when they were photographed, a familiarity with the peculiarities of finger prints, and the methods of describing and classifying them, would become common. Wherever finger prints may be wanted for purposes of attestation and the like, the fact mentioned by Sir W. Herschel ([p. 45]) as to the readiness with which his native orderlies learnt to take them with the ink of his office stamp, must not be forgotten.

The remarks about to be made refer to identification generally, and are not affected by the fact that the complete process may or may not include the preliminary search of a catalogue; the two stages of search and of comparison will be treated separately towards the close of the chapter.

In civilised lands, honest citizens rarely need additional means of identification to their signatures, their photographs, and to personal introductions. The cases in which other evidence is wanted are chiefly connected with violent death through accident, murder, or suicide, which yield the constant and gruesome supply to the Morgue of Paris, and to corresponding institutions in other large towns, where the bodies of unknown persons are exposed for identification, often in vain. But when honest persons travel to distant countries where they have few or no friends, the need for a means of recognition is more frequently felt. The risk of death through accident or crime is increased, and the probability of subsequent identification diminished. There is a possibility not too remote to be disregarded, especially in times of war, of a harmless person being arrested by mistake for another man, and being in sore straits to give satisfactory proof of the error. A signature may be distrusted as a forgery. There is also some small chance, when he returns to his own country after a long absence, of finding difficulty in proving who he is. But in civilised lands and in peaceable times, the chief use of a sure means of identification is to benefit society by detecting rogues, rather than to establish the identity of men who are honest. Is this criminal an old offender? Is this new recruit a deserter? Is this professed pensioner personating a man who is dead? Is this upstart claimant to property the true heir, who was believed to have died in foreign lands?

In India and in many of our Colonies the absence of satisfactory means for identifying persons of other races is seriously felt. The natives are mostly unable to sign; their features are not readily distinguished by Europeans; and in too many cases they are characterised by a strange amount of litigiousness, wiliness, and unveracity. The experience of Sir W. Herschel, and the way in which he met these unfavourable conditions by the method of finger prints, has been briefly described in [p. 27]. Lately Major Ferris, of the Indian Staff Corps, happening to visit my laboratory during my absence, and knowing but little of what Sir W. Herschel had done, was greatly impressed by the possibilities of finger prints. After acquainting himself with the process, we discussed the subject together, and he very kindly gave me his views for insertion here. They are as follow, with a few trifling changes of words:—

“During a period of twenty-three years, eighteen of which have been passed in the Political Department of the Bombay Government, the great need of an official system of identification has been constantly forced on my mind.

“The uniformity in the colour of hair, eyes, and complexion of the Indian races renders identification far from easy, and the difficulty of recording the description of an individual, so that he may be afterwards recognised, is very great. Again, their hand-writing, whether it be in Persian or Devanagri letters, is devoid of character and gives but little help towards identification.

“The tenacity with which a native of India cleaves to his ancestral land, his innate desire to acquire more and more, and the obligation that accrues to him at birth of safeguarding that which has already been acquired, amounts to a religion, and passes the comprehension of the ordinary Western mind. This passion, or religion, coupled with a natural taste for litigation, brings annually into the Civil Courts an enormous number of suits affecting land. In a native State at one time under my political charge, the percentage of suits for the possession of land in which the title was disputed amounted to no less than 92, while in 83 per cent of these the writing by which the transfer of title purported to have been made, was repudiated by the former title-holder as fraudulent and not executed by him. When it is remembered that an enormous majority of the landholders whose titles come into court are absolutely illiterate, and that their execution of the documents is attested by a mark made by a third party, frequently, though not always apparently, interested in the transfer, it will be seen that there is a wide door open to fraud, whether by false repudiation or by criminal attempt at dispossession.

“It has frequently happened in my experience that a transfer of title or possession was repudiated; the person purporting to have executed the transfer asserting that he had no knowledge of it, and never authorised any one to write, sign, or present it for registration. This was met by a categorical statement on the part of the beneficiary and of the attesting witnesses, concerning the time, date, and circumstances of the execution and registration, that demolished the simple denial of the man whom it was sought to dispossess. Without going into the ethics of falsehood among Western and Eastern peoples, it would be impossible to explain how what is repugnant to the one as downright lying, is very frequently considered as no more than venial prevarication by the other. This, however, is too large a subject for present purposes, but the fact remains that perjury is perpetrated in Indian Courts to an extent unknown in the United Kingdom.

“The interests of landholders are partially safeguarded by the Act that requires all documents effecting the transfer of immovable property to be registered, but it could be explained, though not in the short space of this letter, how the provisions of the Act can be, and frequently are, fulfilled in the absence of the principal person, the executor.

“Enough has been said to show that if some simple but efficient means could be contrived to identify the person who has executed a bond, cases of fraud such as these would practically disappear from the judicial registers. Were the legislature to amend the Registration Act and require that the original document as well as the copy in the Registration Book should bear the imprint of one or more fingers of the parties to the deed, I have little hesitation in saying that not only would fraud be detected, but that in a short time the facility of that detection would act as a deterrent for the future. [This was precisely the experience of Sir W. Herschel.—F.G.] In the majority of cases, the mere question would be, Is the man A the same person as B, or is he not? and of that question the finger marks would give unerring proof. For example, to take the simplest case, A is sued for possession of some land, the title of which he is stated to have parted with to another for a consideration. The document and the Registration Book both bear the imprint of the index finger of the right hand of A. A repudiates, and a comparison shows that whereas the finger pattern of A is a whorl, the imprint on the document is a loop; consequently A did not execute it.