CHAPTER XII

RACES AND CLASSES

The races whose finger prints I have studied in considerable numbers are English, pure Welsh, Hebrew, and Negro; also some Basques from Cambo in the French Pyrenees, twenty miles south-east of Bayonne. For the Welsh prints I am primarily indebted to the very obliging help of Mr. R. W. Atkinson, of Cardiff, who interested the masters of schools in purely Welsh-speaking mountainous districts on my behalf; for the Hebrew prints to Mr. Isidore Spielman, who introduced me to the great Hebrew schools in London, whose head-masters gave cordial assistance; and for the Negro prints to Sir George Taubman Goldie, Dep. Governor of the Royal Niger Co., who interested Dr Crosse on my behalf, from whom valuable sets of prints were received, together with particulars of the races of the men from whom they were made. As to the Basques, they were printed by myself.

It requires considerable patience and caution to arrive at trustworthy conclusions, but it may emphatically be said that there is no _peculiar_ pattern which characterises persons of any of the above races. There is no particular pattern that is special to any one of them, which when met with enables us to assert, or even to suspect, the nationality of the person on whom it appeared. The only differences so far observed, are statistical, and cannot be determined except through patience and caution, and by discussing large groups.

I was misled at first by some accidental observations, and as it seemed reasonable to expect to find racial differences in finger marks, the inquiries were continued in varied ways until hard fact had made hope no longer justifiable.

After preliminary study, I handed over the collection of racial finger prints to Mr F. Howard Collins, who kindly undertook the labour of tabulating them in many ways, of which it will be only necessary to give an example. Thus, at one time attention was concentrated on a single finger and a single pattern, the most instructive instance being that of arches on the right fore-finger. They admit of being defined with sufficient clearness, having only one doubtful frontier of much importance, namely that at which they begin to break away into nascent-loops, etc. They also occur with considerable frequency on the fore-finger, so the results from a few hundred specimens ought to be fairly trustworthy. It mattered little in the inquiry, at what level the limit was drawn to separate arches from nascent-loops, so long as the same limit was observed in all races alike. Much pains were taken to secure uniformity of treatment, and Mr. Collins selected two limits, the one based on a strict and the other on a somewhat less strict interpretation of the term "arches," but the latter was not so liberal as that which I had used myself in the earlier inquiries (see p. 114). His results showed no great difference in the proportionate frequency of arches in the different races, whichever limit was observed; the following table refers to the more liberal limit:--

TABLE XXX.

_Frequency of Arches in the Right Fore-Finger._

+--------------------------------------------------------------------+ | No. of | Race. | No. of | Per Cents. | | Persons. | | Arches. | | |----------|----------------------------------|---------|------------| | 250 | English | 34 | 13.6 | | 250 | Welsh | 26 | 10.8 | | 1332 | Hebrew | 105 | 7.9 | | 250 | Negro | 27 | 11.3 | | | | | | | | _Hebrews in detail_-- | | | | 500 | Boys, Bell Lane School | 35 | 7.0 | | 400 | Girls, Bell Lane School | 34 | 8.5 | | 220 | Boys, Tavistock St. & Hanway St. | 18 | 8.2 | | 212 | Girls, Hanway Street School | 18 | 8.5 | +--------------------------------------------------------------------+

The two contrasted values here are the English and the Hebrew. The 1332 cases of the latter give a percentage result of 7.9, which differs as may be seen less than 1 per cent from that of any one of the four large groups upon which the average is based. The 250 cases of English are comparatively few, but the experience I have had of other English prints is so large as to enable me to say confidently that the percentage result of 13.6 is not too great. It follows, that the percentage of arches in the English and in the Hebrew differs in the ratio of 13.6 to 7.9, or nearly as 5 to 3. This is the largest statistical difference yet met with. The deficiency in arches among the Hebrews, and to some extent in loops also, is made up by a superiority in whorls, chiefly of the tendril or circlet-in-loop patterns.

It would be very rash to suppose that this relative infrequency of arches among the Hebrews was of fundamental importance, considering that such totally distinct races as the Welsh and the Negro have them in an intermediate proportion. Still, why does it occur? The only answer I can suggest is that the patterns being in some degree hereditary, such accidental preponderances as may have existed among a not very numerous ancestry might be perpetuated. I have some reason to believe that local peculiarities of this sort exist in England, the children in schools of some localities seeming to be statistically more alike in their patterns than English children generally.

Another of the many experiments was the tabulation separately by Mr. Collins of the fore, middle, and ring-fingers of the right hand of fifty persons of each of the five races above-mentioned: English, Welsh, Basque, Hebrew, and different groups of Negroes. The number of instances is of course too small for statistical deductions, but they served to make it clear that no very marked characteristic distinguished the races. The impressions from Negroes betray the general clumsiness of their fingers, but their patterns are not, so far as I can find, different from those of others, they are not simpler as judged either by their contours or by the number of origins, embranchments, islands, and enclosures contained in them. Still, whether it be from pure fancy on my part, or from the way in which they were printed, or from some real peculiarity, the general aspect of the Negro print strikes me as characteristic. The width of the ridges seems more uniform, their intervals more regular, and their courses more parallel than with us. In short, they give an idea of greater simplicity, due to causes that I have not yet succeeded in submitting to the test of measurement.

The above are only a few examples of the laborious work so kindly undertaken for me by Mr. F. H. Collins, but it would serve no useful purpose to give more in this book, as no positive results have as yet been derived from it other than the little already mentioned.

The most hopeful direction in which this inquiry admits of being pursued is among the Hill tribes of India, Australian blacks, and other diverse and so-called aboriginal races. The field of ethnology is large, and it would be unwise as yet to neglect the chance of somewhere finding characteristic patterns.

* * * * *

Differences between finger prints of different classes might continue to exist although those of different races are inconspicuous, because every race contains men of various temperaments and faculties, and we cannot tell, except by observation, whether any of these are correlated with the finger marks. Several different classes have been examined both by Mr. Collins and myself. The ordinary laboratory work supplies finger prints of persons of much culture, and of many students both in the Art and in the Science schools. I took a large number of prints from the worst idiots in the London district, through the obliging assistance of Dr. Fletcher Beech, of the Darenth Asylum; my collections made at Board Schools are numerous, and I have one of field labourers in Dorsetshire and Somersetshire. But there is no notable difference in any of them. For example; the measurements of the ridge-interval gave the same results in the art-students and in the science-students, and I have prints of eminent thinkers and of eminent statesmen that can be matched by those of congenital idiots.[5] No indications of temperament, character, or ability are to be found in finger marks, so far as I have been able to discover.

Of course these conclusions must not be applied to the general shape of the hand, which as yet I have not studied, but which seems to offer a very interesting field for exact inquiry.