“ESTABLISHED THE IMPORTANCE OF FINGERPRINTS IN BOTH BIOLOGICAL AND CRIMINOLOGICAL INVESTIGATION”: FIRST EDITION OF GALTON’S FINGER PRINTS, 1892

GALTON, Francis. Finger Prints. London: Macmillan, 1892. Octavo, original maroon cloth, uncut and mostly unopened.

First edition of Galton’s landmark work, with 24 figures on sixteen plates (one double-page and in color) and 34 tables; Galton’s own fingerprints are reproduced on the title page.

“The earliest modern use of finger-prints as a means of identification was by Thomas Bewick, the engraver. His thumbprint appears on receipts for the first edition of his Aesop in 1818… W.J. Herschel [in an 1880 issue of Nature] reported his use of the handprints of Hindu natives on contracts from 1858 onwards. Before he left India he had instituted a primitive system of criminal identification by means of finger-prints” (PMM 376). Galton, the cousin of Charles Darwin and a pioneer in the study of heredity and genetics, was greatly interested in Herschel’s work, writing three papers on the subject in 1890 and 1891. With Finger Prints, “Galton gathered together all the earlier studies and recorded other experiments, illustrated from photographs and drawings. The outcome of this was the appointment in 1899 of a Royal Commission which came out in favour of the adoption of the system by the British police forces” (PMM 376). “Galton pioneered the development of the finger-print system as a means of personal identification. In the present work, which established the importance of fingerprints in both biological and criminological investigation, Galton described his methods of taking clear and permanent impressions of fingerprints, noted the persistence through life of both the gross and minute details of fingerprint patterns, and demonstrated that the odds of obtaining similar fingerprints from two different fingers were so astronomically great as to prove that two identical fingerprints must be the product of the same finger. He classed fingerprints by the three major categories of whorl, loop, and arch, following the method suggested by Henry Faulds in 1880 [in the same issue of Nature as Herschel’s report]. He also amassed the first data on the influence of heredity on fingerprint patterns, showing that pattern types were transmitted through inheritance” (Norman 867). Garrison & Morton 186.

Text fine, light fading to spine of original cloth. A near-fine copy.