The Origin of Finger-Printing

by William James Herschel

Same day. A. C. Howard, District Superintendent of Police, Nuddea, afterwards Assistant Commissioner at Scotland Yard, and knighted for his services there, as Sir Charles Howard. He gladly gave me a 'repeat' in London after forty-six years. It will be seen how good the persistence has been.

Same day. Three other Assistant Magistrates on the unusually large staff of the district. Among these was F. K. Hewitt, B.C.S., afterwards Commissioner of Chota Nagpur. Twenty-six years later, at my request, he furnished Sir Francis Galton with the 'repeat' printed on p. 93 of his famous work 'Finger-prints' (Macmillan, 1892). I have much later repeats taken at Oxford.

Same day. Ninian H. Thomson, Judge of the Court of Small Causes. He kindly sent me a repeat twenty-eight years later from Florence, and this also appears in the same work, p. 93.

Very early in my experiments I entertained misgivings about the possibility of the impressions being forged by the professional criminals whom we had so much reason to fear. I therefore submitted some specimens to the best artists in Calcutta to imitate. Their failure sufficed to dispel all anxiety on that point. None of them come near Bewick's engravings in accuracy.

Before I left Kishnagar (Nuddea) the violence of the Indigo disturbances had been subdued, but the Courts became choked with suits for enhancement of rent upon the recalcitrant cultivators, and the sore point about the genuineness of leases, &c., became aggravated. I took courage from despair, and in my judicial capacity (if I remember right) addressed an official letter to the Government of Bengal, definitely advocating administrative action to enforce the use of 'finger-prints' by both parties as necessary to the validity of these documents. Unfortunately I kept no private draft of this letter, and have lost the date, probably 1862 or 1863. It must, however, be on record, both in Nuddea and in the Calcutta Secretariat. Nothing came of it, and I took no more pains about it. But a few years ago I was pleasantly reminded by Mr. Horace Cockerell, for some time Secretary to the Government, who gave me the history of its reception, viz. that it had been deemed inadvisable, when things were quieting down, to raise a new controversy of the sort. He added that it was a matter of regret now, that no action whatever had been taken, but he pointed out that legislation would have been necessary to make the new marks admissible in evidence, and to get such a law on the spur of the moment would have been hopeless. That difficulty had certainly never occurred to me when I made the suggestion. But how weighty an objection it was is shown by the fact that it was long, even after the value of finger-prints had been established in practice, before the High Court of Calcutta, in a leading case, declared that the evidence could not be excluded, nay more, that it was cogent. This was many years before such a case in England. At the time I wrote it is quite certain that no Court in India, no pleader, no solicitor had ever recognized such signatures as these.

In 1863 I took my first furlough to England, which changed the current of my thoughts. But I found that my own people had been more interested than I had supposed by my correspondence on the subject. Among my brother Alexander's papers was found after his death a letter telling him my ideas, and asking him to devise a roller of some sort, for oil-ink, better than my soft office pads.

During that and later furloughs I took no public steps about the subject. In society, of course, it was looked on simply as a hobby, attracting no more serious attention than did Bewick's fancy for engraving his thumb-mark in his day. But the warm interest shown by my own people, who had known my early troubles in India, determined me, during my last furlough, that before completing my service I would give the thing an open official trial on my own responsibility. I sailed, 1877, in the P. and O. steamer 'Mongolia', Captain Coleman, with my sister, now Mrs. Maclear, who was an enthusiast on my side. We roused attention enough on board in the Indian Ocean to obtain the finger-prints of the Captain and many of his officers, stewards, and kalāshis; also of many of the passengers, among whom I may especially mention Sir Alfred and Lady Lyall (as they afterwards became), Colonel Garrow Waterfield, and Colonel Chermside. Some thirty years later, 1908, Sir A. Lyall permitted me to take and use his repeat impression. Here are facsimiles of both, and also of Captain Coleman's, the pattern of which was thought then to deserve enlargement. Friendship, which for family reasons sprang up between Colonel Garrow Waterfield and myself, led him to take special interest in my project, and I cannot doubt that he carried that with him to the Punjab, where his reputation was high. Most of the other saloon passengers were business men on their way back to the Far East, and left us at Ceylon. If any one of them had heard of the use of these marks, say in China, I could not but have been told of it. But there was not a breath of the sort. I give here a list of the remaining signatures still in my possession, in case any may meet with recognition: F. Slight, Officer of the 'Mongolia', F. A. Owen, J. Watson, R. Hawkins, F. Wingrove, O. Westphal, J. W. Malet, G. S. Lynch, Mrs. Philip. It is only reasonable, I think, to believe that such a novel and evidently useful idea would have spread by their means wherever they went. My exhibition was frequently asked for, and I always gave a duplicate of his mark to each person, and sometimes added one of my own to show the extraordinary persistence of patterns after nigh twenty years.

Sir Alfred C. Lyall.