Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 75.djvu/154

150 for instance, to find in the handwriting of a young woman murderer, who was of some social position, evidence of more than feminine instability and coquetry is instructive; for the case was an aggravated one of the murder, by poisoning, of three innocent victims—husband, grandmother and brother—for the sake of trifling gain.

A further control of these experiments, an attempt to diminish the masking effect of class-imitativeness, might be achieved by international work, by tests involving the discovery of similar graphic signs in the writing of individuals separated by race and training. A repetition of Binet's test as to the possibility of distinguishing sex-differences might be of value in this country where sex-segregation in education is much less pronounced than it is in France.

Other sociological aspects of handwriting might no doubt be investigated. The variation in individual chirography due to the nature of the letter written, be it of social import or a business note; the change in penmanship that comes with the change of the relation of the writer to the one addressed—all such observations, vague as they are at present, merit consideration. Most suggestive of all is the shift in style that comes when the writer addresses his own eye alone, yielding himself to the fervor of composition or the mental dissipation of being "off parade." But observations under such conditions must at best be made stealthily. A hint at the possibility Of the intrusion of one's mental privacy and, conscience or vanity on the alert again, one's writing hastens to resume its conventional legibility.

The revelations of the autograph as a mental photograph, a graphic representation of social relationships, have never been fully appreciated by the sociologist, although the world at large has always accepted a famous man's autograph as secondary in interest to his photograph alone. The pretense, the dignity, the reserve, the finesse with which one faces the world finds copy in the ostentation, the simplicity, or the ambiguity with which one signs one's name. Indifferent though one may be in penmanship in general, there is something intimate and personal in the autograph that arrests one's interest, so that in the somewhat fantastic world of images, of symbols, it often happens that one adopts a mental picture of his own autograph as the official representative of himself in the counsels of thought.

In any case it is evident that there is a psychology as well as a sociology of handwriting. Tremendously complicated as the problem of diagnosis of individual traits from those tiny strokes of the pen appears, it is yet a legitimate problem of science; for the more progress psychology makes, the more evident it becomes that there is not a mode of expression which is not rooted to its finest detail in the complex psycho-physical organism. Meanwhile, it is fortunate that the task of identifying graphic signs should not be left wholly to the