I INTRODUCTION 15
sure means of identifying themselves is not so small among civilised nations even in peace time, as to be disregarded, certainly not in times of war and of strict passports. But the value to honest men is always great of being able to identify offenders, whether they be merely deserters or formerly convicted criminals, and the method of finger prints is shown to be applicable to that purpose. For aid in searching the registers of a criminal intelligence bureau, its proper rank is probably a secondary one ; the primary being some form of the already established Bertillon anthropometric method. Whatever power the latter gives of successfully searching registers, that power would be multiplied many hundredfold by the inclusion of finger prints, because their peculiarities are entirely unconnected with other personal characteristics, as we shall see further on. A brief account is given in this chapter of the Bertillon system, and an attempt is made on a small scale to verify its performance, by analysing five hundred sets of measures made at my own laboratory. These, combined with the quoted experiences in attempting to identify deserters in the United States, allow a high value to this method, though not so high as has been claimed for it, and show the importance of supplementary means. But whenever two suspected duplicates of measurements, bodily marks, photographs and finger prints have to be compared, the lineations of the finger prints would give an incomparably more trustworthy answer to the question, whether or no the suspicion of their referring to the same person was justified, than all
