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OCR Rendition - approximate
2 4 FINGER PRINTS CHAP. to minute scrutiny ; but no, account has yet reached me of trials in any of their courts of law, about disputed signatures, in which the identity of the party who was said to have signed with his finger print, had. been established or disproved by comparing it with a print made by him then and there. The reader need be troubled with only a few examples, taken out of a considerable collection of extracts from books and letters, in which prints,. or rather daubs of the above kind, are mentioned. A good instance off their small real value may be seen in the Trans. China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, Part 1, 1847, published at HongKong, which contains a paper on "'Land Tenure in China," by T. Meadows Taylor, with a deed concerning a sale of land, in facsimile, and its translation : this ends, " The mother and the son, the sellers, have in the presence of all the parties, received the price of the land in full, amounting to sixty-four taels and five mace, in perfect dollars weighed in scales. Impression of the finger of the mother, of the maiden name of Chin." The impression, as it appears in the woodcut, is roundish in outline, and was therefore made by the tip and not the bulb of the finger. Its surface is somewhat mottled, but there is no trace of any ridges. The native clerks of Bengal give the name of tipsahi to the mark impressed by illiterate persons who, refusing to make either a X or their caste-mark, dip their finger into the ink-pot and touch the document. The tipsahi is not supposed to indivi-
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