Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 63.djvu/389



N a former number of this magazine (November, 1902) I gave a brief account of the epidermic ridges upon the human palmar and plantar surfaces, and emphasized their great individual difference and their applicability for use in the identification of individuals, living or dead. In the present article I shall endeavor to set forth a simple method by means of which these individual records may be formulated and classified and thus be rendered serviceable as a practical system of personal identification.

Aside from the use of photographs and the more obvious descriptive methods, which include such attributes as height, weight, color of eyes and hair, moles, birth and tattoo marks, etc., there are now in use two distinct scientific systems of identification, that of M. Alphonse Bertillon, based upon bodily measurements, and that of Mr. Francis Galton, based upon the epidermic ridges of the finger tips.

These two systems are absolutely distinct from one another, although, judging from frequent newspaper notices, they are popularly confused, with a tendency to ascribe both to Bertillon, in the same way that electrical inventions are popularly associated with the name of Edison, or theories of evolution with that of Darwin. Indeed, there seems to be a common disposition in America to ascribe the idea of the use of 'thumb-marks' to Mark Twain, who in his 'Puddenhead Wilson' has undoubtedly done much to call the public attention to the epidermic ridges of that very restricted area, although, as a consequence of the story, one continually meets with the notion that the epidermic pattern