The hidden hand : a contribution to the history of finger prints / [Henry Faulds].
- Faulds, Henry, 1843-1930.
- Date:
- [1920]
Licence: In copyright
Credit: The hidden hand : a contribution to the history of finger prints / [Henry Faulds]. Source: Wellcome Collection.
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![were both living in Asia at the time of their discovery, and they both announced their ideas through the columns of an English scientific journal, entitled Nature, within a month of each other, in the year 1880. In the issue of October 28 of that year, Dr. Henry Faulds, of Tsukiji Hospital, Tokio, published a letter with the title ‘ On the Skin Furrows of the Hand,’ in which he unfolded the method of taking impressions with printer’s ink, and at the same time sent a number of samples to the editor. . .This author has anticipated in a remarkable manner the most important lines of the subject, even to the identification of a man by the traces of finger patterns left upon the objects he has handled, and the identification of a detached hand.” (p. 339). Now here comes the point I wish to be noted :—“Unfortunately, during all this time, between 1858 and 1880, while Herschel was em¬ ploying and extending a simple form of finger-print identification,”— at the rate of about a single finger in one year ! “he seems never to have published anything on the subject, so that Faulds was quite justified in considering his letter of October 28, 1880, the first mention of a new idea.” It was certainly so indexed, I may add, in the U. S. Index Medicus. The authors candidly mention in a foot-note that Herschel’s pamphlet containing a reproduction of the hand “ was unfortunately not available at the time when this chapter was written, yet the main facts are represented above.” The result of the comparison is that Herschel’s “long official employment of a finger-print system ” is contrasted with my own contemptible “ three years study.” In the quotation from Schlaginhaufen on p. 5 of this pamphlet, appears Herschel’s own statement that his official finger-print work began in 1877. He wrote on August 15th, 1879, asking that his method should be adopted, and in the Autumn of 1880 he was back in England, the reply he received from the Inspector-General of India, having seemed to be “ very discouraging ” [see his letter to Nature, November 22, 1894]. This surely leaves a very small fragment of the period between 1877 and autumn of 1880, which includes his voyage from India, in which to prosecute his “ official ” work whatever its obscure nature was. As to his method of securing](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b30622451_0016.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
