Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 38, Number 30, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 December 1905 — FERRETING OUT CRIME BY THUMB PRINTS [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

FERRETING OUT CRIME BY THUMB PRINTS

“By their finger prints ye shall know them.” So greatly impressed are police authorities of the world with the modem system' of identification that it has taken its place permanently by the side of the practically infallible Bertillon plan of measurements. While M, Alphonse Bertillon is not the father of finger-print identification, as he is of anthropometric measurements, h«

adapted the science, so determined and Improved Its methods as to make It the present almost infallible detective agency of the law. It Is much more simple of operation than the system of anthropometric measurements. More than a little care is required to obtain the measurements of a criminal with any degree of accuracy, and the slightest mistake ruins the efficiency. The clumsiest constable could not fail to obtain an accurate finger print. In America the finger-print system has been adopted by the National Bureau of Identification, which Includes among its members the chiefs of police of all the big cities, and it is soon to be placed in active operation. Already many of the larger detective agencies In the United States and Canada are employing it. In a little while every big city in the country will have a finger-print gallery, just as they now possess galleries of photographs of the faces of rogues and their measurements. Dangerous criminals are constantly being traced and brought to justice through the voiceless witness of their finger prints. Last year five thousand identifications were made in England alone through this agency. Only recently two men charged with burglary and murder were extradited from England to France solely upon the incriminating testimony left by their hands at the place of the crime. Prisons are crowded with criminals who bemoan the latter-day shrewdness of the police and the systematic researches of Professor Francis Galton, who called attention to the value of this plan, he asserting that the chance of two sets of finger prints being alike is less than one in 64,000,000. 8o certain and Indisputable is finger print identification that not a few criminals have confessed when confronted by no other evidence. For unknown ages finger prints have been used as a means of Identification. The science Is of the wisdom of the Orient, and Western peoples have been laggards in taking it up. During several centuries the wily Chinaman has Insisted that the lines of the holder’s hand shall be Impressed upon the government passport, thus blocking surreptitious transfer. In Japan, state documents bore, as token of imperial sanction, the redhued print of the Emperor’s thumb. India has long employed the thumb print as a check to forgers and land grabbers. The Hindoos, when registering a transfer of land, insisted upon affixing to the document the unchanging attestation of their thumb prints. Not until 1823, however, did Europeans awake to the fact that there were definite and distinctive markings upon the finger tips, which arranged themselves In pronounced and unmistakable patterns. And It was not until forty years later that an eminent English scientist and jurist called attention to the practical infallibility of the finger print as evidence of identification.