A human finger, in ordinary circumstances, may preserve, unimpaired, not only its general pattern of lineations, sometimes very intricate, during its owner’s lifetime, but the minutest details also may be discerned after thirty or forty years, quite unchanged as elements of a pattern, and very likely for a longer period, though scientific observation has not extended much beyond that limit. Long immersion, after death, in water, till the skin is quite sodden, does not readily destroy, does not even greatly obscure, the lineations for the purpose of comparison with earlier printed records of them, and one can still read into finger-print type, so to speak, the lineations of an Egyptian mummy.
When first I ventured to call the attention of the scientific world to the patterns of finger-prints in 1879 or 1880, I suggested that the ancient mummies of Egypt might possibly be found to have retained those features sufficiently to be studied. I had no opportunity of obtaining access to such remains in order to test the point, but on returning to England I found that anticipation to be amply justified, as anyone may verify by a visit to the British Museum. The skin of a mummy is contracted, hard, and wrinkled, but one may trace the lineations through all their loops, joinings, ramifications and whorls, with great distinctness. So that it follows, did an Egyptian register of finger-prints exist, we might unearth the names and titles or deeds of some of those men who lived several thousands of years ago.
There is nothing, so far as has yet been observed, to mark their race out as essentially different from our own, nor do any ancient finger-prints look unlike those of present-day people’s.
The ridges on toes and fingers are visible in children born prematurely, even at a very early period, as I have observed in the practice of my profession, and as soon as the lineations are at all discernible they are of human type. So far as has yet been observed, we do not find that the growing human embryo repeats a history of finger-patterns, beginning at an earlier and lowlier biological stage, as is sometimes contended to be the case in regard to some other organic structures undergoing development.
The efforts I first made to investigate the problem of permanence were chiefly directed to the earlier periods of life, as presenting the greatest likelihood of variation in patterns during rapid growth. A large number of Japanese children, and also some thirty-five or more children of European parentage, in ages from five to ten, were minutely examined time after time during a period of two years—some of them again at longer intervals—without a single variation being detected. The lines and patterns in the fingers of growing children broaden out as the infant grows, but the ideal form—so to speak—of the pattern itself, retains full sway. To grasp this conception clearly is almost the whole science of finger-print identification.
During that period, some of those children suffered severely from scarlet fever, which, as a new disease, took a severe form in Japan, and the desquamation, or skin-peeling, was unusually severe, so that in those cases the test was a severe one. On several occasions I have called attention to the possibility of severe desquamation being followed by some change of patterns, and I still think this subject merits the attention of medical men, but no actual fact illustrating the apparent danger has yet been brought under notice. This may, however, be simply the result of a high degree of inattention to a subject which medical men do not seem to have interested themselves in until very recently. In acromegaly, a disease in which the fingers take on gigantic features, one might expect to find a very notable change of patterns, perhaps the addition of fresh lineations, but after some attempts to collect information not one single example of the kind has yet reached me.
Besides testing growing children in the manner I have stated, many Japanese medical students between the ages of twenty and thirty were made use of in this way. The ridges were carefully shaved by razors, or smoothed away by sand-paper, emery dust, or pumice stone, so that no distinct patterns could be traced. The same tests were applied to my own fingers and to those of one or two medical friends who were quite sceptical as to the continuity of the patterns. Many of the patients at the hospital, or out-door dispensary, were also induced to submit, but not a single instance of variation in the patterns was ever brought to light. My own fingerprints have not varied since that date, a period of fully thirty years. However smooth the surface had been made, the old design came up again with perfect fidelity, yielding exactly the same imprints as before, subject only to those very minor variations already described in a previous chapter, to which even engravings are subject. Up to the period of my final return to England in 1887, a period of nearly nine years, enthusiastic and vigilant observation of this point gave me complete confidence in the permanence of finger-print patterns as a basis of personal identification. With the exception of acromegaly and skin-peeling after acute fevers, I can conceive of no biological reason why changes might be anticipated in those patterns, and up to the present no evidence has reached me that even those conditions do effect pattern changes. In old age the ridges shrink somewhat, and wrinkles here and there betray the drying up of tissues, which facts are revealed in printed impressions by fine white lines, often cutting across the lineations, not unlike those which occur in box-wood engravings, where hair-like lines betray some cleavage of the wood. In such a case the value of the pattern is not affected as a proof of identity. One may go beyond that, and say that, if after a lapse of forty years or so the old pattern is now crossed by wrinkles which were not there in youth, the two prints are from the same individual.
Other observers—Sir Francis Galton, Sir William Herschel, and the police of this and other countries—have accumulated a vast store of conclusive evidence on this point.
We are now amply justified in assuming that, for all practical purposes of identification, the patterns on human fingers are, throughout life, persistent and unchangeable. Such slight and transient changes—not due to mere variations of pressure, inking, and the like, as they usually are—are no more likely to invalidate an identification than a new freckle or pimple on a man’s face would make him unrecognizable by his intimate friends.
Dr. J. G. Garson, in an article in the Daily Express of July 20th, 1905, writing on this subject, which he has carefully studied, said:—