The races I have chiefly examined are English, most of whom were of the
upper and middle classes; the others chiefly from London board schools;
Welsh, from the purest Welsh-speaking districts of South Wales; Jews from
the large London schools, and Negroes from the territories of the Royal
Niger Company. I have also a collection of Basque prints taken at Cambo,
some twenty miles inland from Biarritz, which, although small, is large
enough to warrant a provisional conclusion. As a first and only an
approximately correct description, the English, Welsh, Jews, Negroes, and
Basques, may all be spoken of as identical in the character of their
finger prints; the same familiar patterns appearing in all of them with
much the same degrees of frequency, the differences between groups of
different races being not larger than those that occasionally occur
between groups of the same race. The Jews have, however, a decidedly
larger proportion of Whorled patterns than other races, and I should have
been tempted to make an assertion about a peculiarity in the Negroes, had
not one of their groups differed greatly from the rest. The task of
examination has been laborious thus far, but it would be much more so to
arrive with correctness at a second and closer approximation to the truth.
It is doubtful at present whether it is worth while to pursue the subject,
except in the case of the Hill tribes of India and a few other peculiarly
diverse races, for the chance of discovering some characteristic and
perhaps a more monkey-like pattern.
Considerable collections of prints of persons belonging to different
classes have been analysed, such as students in science, and students in
arts; farm labourers; men of much culture; and the lowest idiots in the
London district (who are all sent to Darenth Asylum), but I do not, still
as a first approximation, find any decided difference between their finger
prints. The ridges of artists are certainly not more delicate and close
than those of men of quite another stamp.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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