With all these diagnostic methods it may still be impossible to establish identity either absolute or relative, even where a whole skeleton is in question. The evidence may, however, be of great juridical use to the accused, as in the case of Van Solen, tried for the murder of Dr. Henry Harcourt, where the collective facts pointed to the identification of a body dead two years. The jury, however, after a second trial, were instructed to acquit unless they were certain that the remains were Harcourt’s. They acquitted, as no one decided and apparent feature was known to have existed by which the remains could be identified beyond a doubt.[572]
Identity in Case of Entire Skeleton or in Case of Isolated Bones.
Where an entire human skeleton has been discovered, the objects of inquiry here, as in the case of fragments or remains, are to establish the identity of the victim and that of the author of the act, and to collect all available information relative to the nature of the death and to the diverse circumstances attending the commission of the deed.
In gathering evidence from the examination of the skeleton or of isolated bones, with a view to find out the probable cause of death of the person of whom they form a part, a great variety of questions will arise for consideration, such as those relating to race, stature, age, sex, and trade or occupation; the exterior signs furnished by dentition; the traces of congenital peculiarity or of injury, and the signs of disease either hereditary or acquired.
Determination of Race.
The question of race in connection with the subject of identification is of more than usual importance in the United States, owing to our motley population, composed as it is of aboriginal Americans, Chinamen, negroes, and of Europeans and their descendants. I well remember the first human bones that I saw exhumed. They were discovered in digging the foundation of a building near a kitchen-midden on one of the tributaries of the Chesapeake Bay. The apparent oldness of the bones and the finding of stone arrow-heads, tomahawks, and fragments of aboriginal pottery in the immediate vicinity were additional accessory facts that strengthened the presumption of the bones being those of a Choptank Indian.
Roughly speaking, there is not much trouble in recognizing the platycnemic tibiæ of the mound-builder, the skull of a Flathead Indian, an Inca skull, a negro skull, or even the skull peculiar to the lower order of Irish.
In many very old skulls a considerable portion of hair is often found attached. This of course may lend assistance in the matter of race identity. A few years since I undertook at the Smithsonian Institution a series of micro-photographs of the structure and arrangement of hair, with a view to race classification as suggested by Professor Huxley. Various specimens of hair from the yellow races were compared with that of fair and of blue-eyed persons, with the hair of negroes, with reindeer hair, and with the hair-like appendage found on the fringy extremity of the baleen plates in the mouth of a “bowhead” whale. The experiments, though far from satisfactory, were sufficiently conclusive to enable one to recognize approximately the horse-like hair of some of the yellow races, that of the negro, and that of a blond Caucasian.