Two writers in Nature, both having for their theme "Skin-furrows on the Hand," solicit information on the subject from China.[1] As the subject is considered to have a bearing on medical jurisprudence and ethnology as well, this report is a suitable vehicle for responding to the demand.
[Footnote 1: Henry Faulds, Tzukiyi Hospital, Tokio, Japan. W. J. Herschel, Oxford, England.--Nature, 28th October and 25th November, 1880.]
Dr. Faulds' observations on the finger-tips of the Japanese have an ethnic bearing and relate to the subject of heredity. Mr. Herschel considers the subject as an agent of Government, he having charge for twenty years of registration offices in India, where he employed finger marks as sign manuals, the object being to prevent personation and repudiation. Doolittle, in his "Social Life of the Chinese," describes the custom. I cannot now refer to native works where the practice of employing digital rugæ as a sign manual is alluded to. I doubt if its employment in the courts is of ancient date. Well-informed natives think that it came into vogue subsequent to the Han period; if so, it is in Egypt that earliest evidence of the practice is to be found. Just as the Chinese courts now require criminals to sign confessions by impressing thereto the whorls of their thumb-tips--the right thumb in the case of women, the left in the case of men--so the ancient Egyptians, it is represented, required confessions to be sealed with their thumbnails--most likely the tip of the digit, as in China. Great importance is attached in the courts to this digital form of signature, "finger form." Without a confession no criminal can be legally executed, and the confession to be valid must be attested by the thumb-print of the prisoner. No direct coercion is employed to secure this; a contumacious culprit may, however, be tortured until he performs the act which is a prerequisite to his execution. Digital signatures are sometimes required in the army to prevent personation; the general in command at Wenchow enforces it on all his troops. A document thus attested can no more be forged or repudiated than a photograph--not so easily, for while the period of half a lifetime effects great changes in the physiognomy, the rugæ of the fingers present the same appearance from the cradle to the grave; time writes no wrinkles there. In the army everywhere, when the description of a person is written down, the relative number of volutes and coniferous finger-tips is noted. It is called taking the "whelk striæ," the fusiform being called "rice baskets," and the volutes "peck measures." A person unable to write, the form of signature which defies personation or repudiation is required in certain domestic cases, as in the sale of children or women. Often when a child is sold the parents affix their finger marks to the bill of sale; when a husband puts away his wife, giving her a bill of divorce, he marks the document with his entire palm; and when a wife is sold, the purchaser requires the seller to stamp the paper with hands and feet, the four organs duly smeared with ink. Professional fortune tellers in China take into account almost the entire system of the person whose future they attempt to forecast, and of course they include palmistry, but the rugæ of the finger-ends do not receive much attention. Amateur fortune-tellers, however, discourse as glibly on them as phrenologists do of "bumps"--it is so easy. In children the relative number of volute and conical striæ indicate their future. "If there are nine volutes," says a proverb, "to one conical, the boy will attain distinction without toil."
Regarded from an ethnological point of view, I can discover merely that the rugæ of Chinamen's fingers differ from Europeans', but there is so little uniformity observable that they form no basis for distinction, and while the striæ may be noteworthy points in certain medico-legal questions, heredity is not one of them.
LUCIDITY.
At the close of an interesting address lately delivered at the reopening of the Liverpool University College and School of Medicine, Mr. Matthew Arnold said if there was one word which he should like to plant in the memories of his audience, and to leave sticking there after he had gone, it was the word lucidity. If he had to fix upon the three great wants at this moment of the three principal nations of Europe, he should say that the great want of the French was morality, that the great want of the Germans was civil courage, and that our own great want was lucidity. Our own want was, of course, what concerned us the most. People were apt to remark the defects which accompanied certain qualities, and to think that the qualities could not be desirable because of the defects which they saw accompanying them. There was no greater and salutary lesson for men to learn than that a quality may be accompanied, naturally perhaps, by grave dangers; that it may actually present itself accompanied by terrible defects, and yet that it might itself be indispensable. Let him illustrate what he meant by an example, the force of which they would all readily feel. Seriousness was a quality of our nation. Perhaps seriousness was always accompanied by certain dangers. But, at any rate, many of our French neighbors would say that they found our seriousness accompanied by so many false ideas, so much prejudice, so much that was disagreeable, that it could not have the value which we attributed to it. And yet we knew that it was invaluable. Let them follow the same mode of reasoning as to the quality of lucidity. The French had a national turn for lucidity as we had a national turn for seriousness. Perhaps a national turn for lucidity carried with it always certain dangers. Be this as it might, it was certain that we saw in the French, along with their lucidity, a want of seriousness, a want of reverence, and other faults, which greatly displeased us. Many of us were inclined in consequence to undervalue their lucidity, or to deny that they had it. We were wrong: it existed as our seriousness existed; it was valuable as our seriousness was valuable. Both the one and the other were valuable, and in the end indispensable.
What was lucidity? It was negatively that the French have it, and he would therefore deal with its negative character merely. Negatively, lucidity was the perception of the want of truth and validness in notions long current, the perception that they are no longer possible, that their time is finished, and they can serve us no more. All through the last century a prodigious travail for lucidity was going forward in France. Its principal agent was a man whose name excited generally repulsion in England, Voltaire. Voltaire did a great deal of harm in France. But it was not by his lucidity that he did harm; he did it by his want of seriousness, his want of reverence, his want of sense for much that is deepest in human nature. But by his lucidity he did good.
All admired Luther. Conduct was three-fourths of life, and a man who worked for conduct, therefore, worked for more than a man who worked for intelligence. But having promised this, it might be said that the Luther of the eighteenth century and of the cultivated classes was Voltaire. As Luther had an antipathy to what was immoral, so Voltaire had an antipathy to what was absurd, and both of them made war upon the object of their antipathy with such masterly power, with so much conviction, so much energy, so much genius, that they carried their world with them--Luther his Protestant world, and Voltaire his French world--and the cultivated classes throughout the continent of Europe generally.