There are almost always moles or birth-marks, serving for identification,
on the body of every one, and a record of these is, as already noted, an
important though subsidiary part of the Bertillon system. Body-marks are
noted in the English registers of criminals, and it is curious how large a
proportion of these men are tattooed and scarred. How far the body-marks
admit of being usefully charted on the American plan, it is difficult to
say, the success of the method being largely dependent on the care with
which they are recorded. The number of persons hitherto dealt with on the
American plan appears not to be very large. As observations of this class
require the person to be undressed, they are unsuitable for popular
purposes of identification, but the marks have the merit of serving to
identify at all ages, which the measurements of the limbs have not.
It seems strange that no register of this kind, so far as I know, takes
account of the teeth. If a man, on being first registered, is deficient in
certain teeth, they are sure to be absent when he is examined on a future
occasion. He may, and probably will in the meantime, have lost others, but
the fact of his being without specified teeth on the first occasion,
excludes the possibility of his being afterwards mistaken for a man who
still possesses them.
We will now separately summarise the results arrived at, in respect to the
two processes that may both be needed in order to effect an
identification.
First, as regards _search in an Index_.--Some sets of measures will give
trouble, but the greater proportion can apparently be catalogued with so
much certainty, that if a second set of measures of any individual be
afterwards taken, no tedious search will be needed to hunt out the former
set. Including the bodily marks and photographs, let us rate the Bertillon
method as able to cope with a register of 20,000 adults of the same sex,
with a small and definable, but as yet unknown, average dose of
difficulty, which we will call _x_.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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