In concluding these introductory remarks, I have to perform the grateful duty of acknowledging my indebtedness to Mr. F. Howard Collins, who materially helped me during the past year. He undertook the numerous and tedious tabulations upon which the chapters on Heredity, and on Races and Classes, are founded, and he thoroughly revised nearly the whole of my MS., to the great advantage of the reader of this book.
CHAPTER II
PREVIOUS USE OF FINGER PRINTS
The employment of impressions of the hand or fingers to serve as sign-manuals will probably be found in every nation of importance, but the significance attached to them differs. It ranges from a mere superstition that personal contact is important, up to the conviction of which this book will furnish assurance, that when they are properly made, they are incomparably the most sure and unchanging of all forms of signature. The existence of the superstitious basis is easily noted in children and the uneducated; it occupies a prominent place in the witchcrafts of barbarians. The modern witness who swears on the Bible, is made to hold it and afterwards to kiss it; he who signs a document, touches a seal or wafer, and declares that “this is my act and deed.” Students of the primitive customs of mankind find abundant instances of the belief, that personal contact communicates some mysterious essence from the thing touched to the person who touches it, and vice versa; but it is unnecessary here to enter further into these elementary human reasonings, which are fully described and discussed by various well-known writers.
The next grade of significance attached to an impression resembles that which commends itself to the mind of a hunter who is practised in tracking. He notices whether a footprint he happens to light upon, is larger or smaller, broader or narrower, or otherwise differs from the average, in any special peculiarity; he thence draws his inferences as to the individual who made it. So, when a chief presses his hand smeared with blood or grime, upon a clean surface, a mark is left in some degree characteristic of him. It may be that of a broad stumpy hand, or of a long thin one; it may be large or small; it may even show lines corresponding to the principal creases of the palm. Such hand prints have been made and repeated in many semi-civilised nations, and have even been impressed in vermilion on their State documents, as formerly by the sovereign of Japan. Though mere smudges, they serve in a slight degree to individualise the signer, while they are more or less clothed with the superstitious attributes of personal contact. So far as I can learn, no higher form of finger printing than this has ever existed, in regular and well-understood use, in any barbarous or semi-civilised nation. The ridges dealt with in this book could not be seen at all in such rude prints, much less could they be utilised as strictly distinctive features. It is possible that when impressions of the fingers have been made in wax, and used as seals to documents, they may sometimes have been subjected to minute scrutiny; but no account has yet reached me of trials in any of their courts of law, about disputed signatures, in which the identity of the party who was said to have signed with his finger print, had been established or disproved by comparing it with a print made by him then and there. The reader need be troubled with only a few examples, taken out of a considerable collection of extracts from books and letters, in which prints, or rather daubs of the above kind, are mentioned.
A good instance of their small real value may be seen in the Trans. China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, Part 1, 1847, published at Hong-Kong, which contains a paper on “Land Tenure in China,” by T. Meadows Taylor, with a deed concerning a sale of land, in facsimile, and its translation: this ends, “The mother and the son, the sellers, have in the presence of all the parties, received the price of the land in full, amounting to sixty-four taels and five mace, in perfect dollars weighed in scales. Impression of the finger of the mother, of the maiden name of Chin.” The impression, as it appears in the woodcut, is roundish in outline, and was therefore made by the tip and not the bulb of the finger. Its surface is somewhat mottled, but there is no trace of any ridges.
The native clerks of Bengal give the name of tipsahi to the mark impressed by illiterate persons who, refusing to make either a X or their caste-mark, dip their finger into the ink-pot and touch the document. The tipsahi is not supposed to individualise the signer, it is merely a personal ceremony performed in the presence of witnesses.