Palm‐Prints

IT has long been believed that a man’s external appearances must reveal something of his internal nature. In the 18th century, when LAVATER made his celebrated studies of physiognomy in what he thought was a scientific fashion, he believed he had defined facial characteristics so that it was possible to reach definite conclusions about a person’s character by merely studying his face. He was tempted to go further, and he related the extraordinary skin, covered with deer-coloured hair, that he found in a girl to an argument her mother had had with a neighbour about a stag while she was pregnant. In his essays such curious beliefs and fancies are intermingled with acute observations. Despite its obvious limitations, the study of the face can clearly reveal something of the owner’s nature, as witness the Parkinsonian facies. Other external parts of the body can yield almost equally valuable information. The hand has always attracted attention and, while the traditional gypsy still tells your fortune for the traditional reward, research workers are now busy submitting palm-prints to scientific investigation. However, the gypsy bases her fortune-telling on the flexion creases in the hand, whereas it is the dermal ridges whose study from a medical point of view is discussed by Dr. SARAH B. HOLT, of the Galton Laboratory, on another page. It is not always realised that these ridges, rather than the skin-creases, are the subject of modern dermatoglyphic study. Various ancient peoples seem to have used finger-prints as a means of identification, and Biblical sources are sometimes quoted in support of this view. In the Book of Job (Ch. 37, v. 7), for instance, we find : ‘He sealeth up the hand of ever?. man; that all men may know his work.’ These prints have certainly been used as signatures since early times. The modern story probably starts with an English engraver-THOMAS BEWICK-who was so struck with the beauty of finger-prints that he made engravings on wood of his own prints and used them as marks of identification on some of his works. BEWICK died in 1828, and shortly before that, in 1823, JOHANNES h R K I N J E , the Bohemian physiologist, first classified the dermal ridge patterns in a thesis presented to the University of Breslau. But the real father of modern finger-prints was Sir WILLIAM HERSCHEL (not the astronomer), who first began to use finger-prints for identification purposes around 1857 in Bengal, to prevent the impersonation which was then highly prevalent in the Bengal courts. The experiment was so successful that the Indians came to regard finger-prints with superstitious awe. A system of classifying fingerprints was later devised by Sir EDWARD HENRY, at one time private secretary to