Part 1

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THE ORIGIN OF FINGER-PRINTING

BY

SIR WILLIAM J. HERSCHEL, BART.

HUMPHREY MILFORD OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS LONDON EDINBURGH GLASGOW NEW YORK TORONTO MELBOURNE BOMBAY 1916

PRINTED IN ENGLAND AT THE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

DEDICATION

_TO SIR EDWARD HENRY, G.C.V.O., K.C.B., C.S.I._

_Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police._

_I am offering you this old story of the beginnings of Finger-printing, by way of expressing my warm and continuous admiration of those masterly developments of its original applications, whereby, first in Bengal and the Transvaal, and then in England, you have fashioned a weapon of penetrating certainty for the sterner needs of Justice._

_W. J. HERSCHEL._ _June, 1916._

PREFACE

The following pages have two objects: first, to place on record the genesis of the Finger-print method of personal identification, from its discovery in Bengal in 1858, till its public demonstration there in 1877-8; secondly, to examine the scanty suggestions of evidence that this use of our fingers had been foreshadowed in Europe more than a hundred years ago, and had indeed been general in ancient times, especially in China.

In later years, and in energetic hands, the method has been developed into a system far more effective than anything I contemplated, and I do not go into that part of the story; but I believe these pages will suffice to show the originality of my study of its two essential features, the strict individuality and the stubborn persistence of the patterns on our fingers.

The gift granted to me of lighting upon a discovery which promised escape from one great difficulty of administration in India is more than ever appreciated by me since I have lived to see the promise wonderfully fulfilled there, and in other lands as well.

For the sake of interest I give, among the illustrations, several examples of late 'repeats' taken many years after I left India; but these do not belong to my story.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE Bengalee contract with Rājyadhar Kōnāi, 1858. (_Collotype_) _Between pages_ 8 _and_ 9

Finger-print of Dr. R. F. Hutchinson, Medical Officer at Arrah Station, June 1859 10

Finger-print of Captain H. Raban, Chief of the Police in Lower Bengal, July 29,1860 12

Finger-print of the Mahārājā of Nuddea, April 13, 1862 13

Finger-print of Sir Charles Howard, Superintendent of Police, Nuddea, April 13, 1862; and repeat, 1908 13

Finger-print of Sir Alfred C. Lyall, 1877; and repeat, 1908 17

Finger-print of Captain A. Coleman, P. & O. SS. 'Mongolia', February 1877 17

Finger-prints of Bechā Rām Dās Adhikāri, (_a_) made in 1877, (_b_) made in 1892 21

Finger-print of W. F. Courthope, 1877; and repeat, 1913 27

Finger-print of Captain V. H. Haggard, R.N., 1877, aet. 2¾ years; and repeat, 1913. (_Collotype_) _Facing_ 27

Finger-print of Colonel J. Herschel, R.E., September 22, 1877 28

Finger-print of Dr. J. F. Duthie, September 22, 1877 28

Finger-print of Sir Theodore Hope, Bo.C.S., 1877 29

Finger-prints of William Waterfield, B.C.S., (_a_) July 31, 1860, (_b_) March 31, 1877 29

Finger-prints of W. J. Herschel, (_a_) June 1859, (_b_) July 1859, (_c_) March 31, 1877, (_d_) February 22, 1916 30

Finger-prints, enlarged, of A. E. H. Herschel: 1881, aet. 7¾; 1890, aet. 17; 1913, aet. 40 31

'Thomas Bewick his mark' 33

A 'tep-sai' of Bengal compared with a finger-print 35

Caste-marks of illiterates, 1865 36

Finger-mark on a Chinese Bank-note. (_Collotype_) _Facing_ 38

THE ORIGIN OF FINGER-PRINTING

In 1858, after five years' service, as an Assistant under the old East India Company, in the interior of Bengal, I was in charge of my first subdivision, the head-quarters of which were then at Jungipoor, on the upper reaches of the Hooghly river. My executive and magisterial experience had by that time forced on me that distrust of all evidence tendered in Court which did so much to cloud our faith in the people around us. We cannot be too thankful that things have greatly improved in India in the last sixty years, but the time of which I am speaking was the very worst time of my life in this respect. I remember only too well writing in great despondency to one of the best and soberest-minded of my senior companions at Haileybury[1] about my despair of any good coming from orders and decisions based on such slippery facts, and the comfort I found in his sensible reply.

[1] Till 1857 the East India Company's College.

It happened, in July of that year, that I was starting the first bit of road metalling at Jungipoor, and invited tenders for a supply of 'ghooting' (a good binding material for light roads). A native named Rājyadhar Kōnāi, of the village of Nistā, came to terms with me, and at my desire drew up our agreement in his own hand, in true commercial style. He was about to sign it in the usual way, at the upper right-hand corner, when I stopped him in order to read it myself; and it then occurred to me to try an experiment by taking the stamp of his hand, by way of signature instead of writing. There was nothing very original about that, as an idea. Many must have heard of some such use of a man's hand; and the correspondence that has taken place has brought to light old instances of the hand, or the nail of a finger, or the teeth in one's mouth, being used to certify a man's act, or a woman's. But these have all been isolated instances. Sir Francis Galton, however, has pointed out[2] that in our own times the engraver Bewick had a fancy for engraving his thumb-mark, with his name attached, as vignettes, or as colophons, in books which he published.[3] As a boy I had loved Bewick on Birds: I regret that it is not now to be found in our library. Galton's remark has reminded me that I used to see the thumb-mark there, as well as I recollect, in an ornamental title-page. I mention this because I dare say it had something to do with my fascination over Kōnāi's hand-markings. If so, the influence was unknown to me. The absorbing interests of manhood had blotted out, not Bewick, but his thumb-mark, from my memory. However that may be, I was only wishing to frighten Kōnāi out of all thought of repudiating his signature hereafter. He, of course, had never dreamt of such an attestation, but fell in readily enough. I dabbed his palm and fingers over with the home-made oil-ink used for my official seal, and pressed the whole hand on the back of the contract, and we studied it together, with a good deal of chaff about palmistry, comparing his palm with mine on another impression. Here is a facsimile of the whole document, made by the Clarendon Press. I was so pleased with the experiment that, having to make a second contract with Kōnāi, I made him attest it in the same way. One of these contracts I gave to Sir Francis (then Mr.) Galton for his celebrated paper read before the Royal Society, November 1890, to which body he presented it; the other lies before me now. Trials with my own fingers soon showed the advantage of using them instead of the whole hand for the purpose then in view, i.e. for securing a signature which the writer would obviously hesitate to disown. That he might be infallibly convicted of perjury, if he did, is a very different matter. That was not settled, and could not have been settled, to the satisfaction of Courts of Justice, till, after many years, abundant agreement had been reached among ordinary people. The very possibility of such a 'sanction' (to use a technical expression) to the use of a finger-print did not dawn upon me till after long experience, and even then it became no more than a personal conviction for many years more. The decisiveness of a finger-print is now one of the most powerful aids to Justice. Our possession of it derives from the impression of Kōnāi's hand in 1858.

[2] 'Finger-prints' (Macmillan, 1892), p. 26.

[3] See Appendix.

Of trials with my own fingers the oldest impression I possess was taken in June 1859, when I first began to keep records. I had been transferred to be Magistrate of Arrah, the most north-westerly district of Bengal, where the Mutiny still left work to do which allowed little time for private hobbies; but I took so many prints among the society of the Station, as well as among Indians of all classes, that my 'fad' about them was well known. The Medical Officer of Arrah was Dr. R. F. Hutchinson, who naturally took great interest in the subject. Twenty-one years later, in 1880, he was still there, and sent me a 'repeat' print of his fingers. Here is a facsimile of his first Arrah impression. In 1890, being in England, he visited Galton's Laboratory, and gave a second repeat (after thirty-one years) which was used in 'Finger-prints' (1892), p. 93, to support Mr. Galton's evidence of 'Persistency'. In the facsimile 'Collection 1858-1913', which I am attaching to some of the copies of this narrative, will be found other prints which I took at Arrah of my whole hand and of my right foot. They agree irresistibly with prints taken now after an interval of fifty-seven years.

In 1860 I was sent as Magistrate to Nuddea, nearer to Calcutta. The Indigo disturbances in the district had given rise to a great deal of violence, litigation, and fraud; forgery and perjury were rampant. The rent-rolls of the ryots put into Court by the Zemindars; the pottahs (agreements for rent) purporting to be issued by them to each ryot, put in by the latter; the kabooliyats (acceptances) purporting to be signed by the ryot, and tendered in evidence against him; all these documents were frequently worth no more than the paper on which they were written. In my own jail a notorious convict was found making clay seals of well-known landlords, and forging their signatures on pottahs smuggled into his hands. He was detected by the colour of the floor of his cell, where he kept his stock-in-trade buried. Things were so bad in this and other ways that the administration of Civil Justice had unusual difficulty in preserving its dignity. I was driven to take up finger-prints now with a definite object before me, and for three years continued taking a very large number from all sorts and conditions of men. I give here some selected impressions of friends taken in Nuddea during the years 1860, 1861, and 1862, in order of date, and names of some others.

1860, July. Claude Brown, a prominent merchant of Calcutta, who was making a tour in the Indigo districts, and was at the time my guest.

1860, July 29. Captain H. Raban, Head of the Bengal Police, sent to Nuddea on account of its disturbed state; also my guest. He took extreme interest in the evidence of his own imprint. It was my habit, of course, to give duplicates of his 'mark' to every one of importance.

1860, July 31. W. Waterfield, B.C.S., a college friend, afterwards Comptroller-General of the Treasuries of India. I have several 'repeats' of his; see especially p. 29.

1861, June 24. Ogilvie Temple, Judge of the Court of Small Causes, Kooshtea.

1862, April 13. At a gathering at my house at Kishnagar I had the good fortune to secure the prints of many other notables of the district.

The Mahārājā of Nuddea. He was the highest of the old nobility of Bengal. He was much struck, as I was, by the remarkable symmetry of the 'pattern' on one of his fingers at the core.

Same day. E. Grey, B.C.S. A college friend, on my staff, afterwards Civil and Sessions Judge. He, I am happy to say, is still alive (1916), and his 'repeat' is quite good now.

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.

On my return to India, my position as Magistrate and Collector at Hooghly, near Calcutta, gave me the control, not only of criminal courts, but of the jail, and of the modern Department for Registration of Deeds of all sorts, and among minor duties the payment of Government pensions. Registration, of course, appealed most strongly to my desires, but the Sub-Registrar and his clerks had to be trained, and meanwhile the few pensioners enabled me to break the ice myself. I was not a little anxious lest, officially introduced, Hindus might take alarm for their caste. The memory of the greased cartridges of the Mutiny, so near Hooghly, was indelible. In private experiments I had never met any such difficulty, but the old lesson had been a severe one, and I thought it well, when acting officially, to take every precaution. I was careful, therefore, from the first ostentatiously to employ Hindus to take the impressions wanted; using, as if a matter of course, the pad and the ink made by one of themselves from the very seed-oil and lamp-black which were in constant use for the office seals in the several departments.

The glad approval of the pensioners was a great pleasure to me, and made the other registration work astonishingly easy. The clerks took to it unhesitatingly, and enjoyed the fun of explaining the 'Sahib's hikmat'. No one ever hesitated to do as he was told, or to take away duplicates for talk at home. The process of registration at that time was regulated by a late law devised to afford the best security then possible for the genuineness of deeds, as far as attestation went. The signatures, whether in full or by caste mark, or by cross, or, in the case of women mostly, by touching the paper with the tip of the finger wetted with ink from the clerk's pen (see p. 35), were always made in the presence and under the eye of the Registrar, who, in most cases, had to rely on the sworn evidence of witnesses attesting their personal knowledge of the executant. The Registrar was, of course, responsible for using his intelligence in each case to prevent imposture. His part of the work was never impeached, that I know, in Bengal; nevertheless, fraudulent attempts did still come to light. Signatures were still denied; personations in presenting false deeds did take place, either to swindle, or, in one case, to fabricate an alibi. As long as I was at Hooghly I was quite satisfied that no will or other deed registered there with the new safeguard would ever be repudiated by the actual executant. I have had to think otherwise since then, because many years afterwards a man (in another district) who had given his finger-print before a Registrar repudiated it. He was summoned to give his evidence on oath. It was found that he had cut off the joints of his fingers, hoping to defeat justice by corrupting the witnesses so as to prove that he was _not_ the man they had recognized before the Registrar. The High Court rejected the sworn story of an accident, and confirmed the facts of the registration, with the necessary consequence to the offender for his perjury. I do not know of any other repudiation having been pressed to this bitter end in India or elsewhere. The contrast between the inherent weakness of the old law and the efficiency of the new test could not be better exemplified. This case gave the first stern blow to the foul mischief that had developed such cruel proportions in India under cover of our conservative legal habits.

The way the new safeguard was applied at Hooghly in 1877 was thus:--After the legal formalities of registration had been observed, the Registrar made the person print his two fingers on the deed, and again in a diary book which was kept by him in the office, for my own inspection rather than as evidence. It is, no doubt, preserved at Hooghly still.

It was from this book that cuttings were made at my request in 1892 by Mr. Duke, the magistrate, which formed the subject of Sir Francis Galton's volume on 'Blurred Finger-prints' (1893), to which, for its cogency in marshalling the evidence, I must refer my readers. I annex a tracing of one of his enlargements, by permission of the London University, to which he left his great collection.

Another form in which I made use of the new system for public purposes was in the jail. The common device of hiring a substitute to serve out a term was not unknown, but it involved a long risk of detection. A safer but very costly, and therefore rare, device was sham death and a purchased corpse, affording comparative safety after escape. A case of this kind, carried out with the aid of an irregularly appointed doctor, was strongly suspected by me at Hooghly.[4] The precaution I adopted was to take the finger-prints of each offender when passing sentence of imprisonment, both on the records of the Court and also on the warrant to the jailer.

[4] I had him dismissed soon after for a different offence.