from the first recommended for a large register, and prepared forms to receive imprints (as shown in facsimile), was adopted and is that now in official use. The methods of Sir William Herschel, followed by that of Sir F. Galton, were much more restricted, and could never have been worked practically in anything but a very small and limited register.

The finger-print system of identification is all but universally applied now throughout the civilized world for criminal cases, and bids fairly well to be soon adopted for other methods of identification than that of professional criminals or recidivists. After great earthquakes, floods, or battles, multitudes of people have to be hastily buried who have never been fully identified. In such cases the existence of a civil or military Finger-print Register would be a very great means of security, and this it is my great wish to see recognized and established.

I wish to make it clear that in 1880 no printed proposal existed to use finger-prints for identification. Sir F. Galton has referred to a United States expedition in which the method was used, but the date was 1882, and the example printed could not identify. He also refers to Mr. Tabor, of San Francisco, who had proposed the registration of Chinamen by this method, as their identity was difficult to establish. I believe this also was in 1882. In a criticism of Dr. Schlaginhaufen’s Bibliography (“F.G.” is the signature) in Nature, the omission of Mr. Tabor’s name is regretted, but why? Did he write on the subject anything which has been preserved? Why, before this period, Dr. Billings, of the United States Army, said at the International Medical Congress: “Just as each individual is in some respects peculiar and unique, so that even the minute ridges and furrows at the end of his forefingers differ from that of all other forefingers, and is sufficient to identify,” etc. So that in America the matter was widely known, and Dr. Billings’ own work on the “Index” attributed its initiation to me.

Again, in 1883, “Mark Twain” published his charming Life on the Mississippi, a very valuable human document. It contains a well-thought-out story of an identification by means of a thumb-print on a system supposed by him to have been invented by a French prison doctor. His Pudd’nhead Wilson, in which a still better study of the subject occurs, did not come out till 1894, the year in which the sitting of Mr. Asquith’s Committee on Identification of Habitual Criminals had set journalists agoing again on the theme of “thumb-prints.” Prior to that year a great deal had been written on the subject, the facts being chiefly taken from the correspondence in Nature, to which reference has been made.

CHAPTER II

SWEAT-PORES, RIDGES AND FURROWS