Many impressions of fingers are found on ancient pottery, as on Roman tiles; indeed the Latin word _palmatus_ is said to mean an impression in soft clay, such as a mark upon a wall, stamped by a blow with the palm. Nail-marks are used ornamentally by potters of various nations. They exist on Assyrian bricks as signatures; for instance, in the Assyrian room of the British Museum, on the west side of the case C 43, one of these bricks contains a notice of sale and is prefaced by words that were translated for me thus: "Nail-mark of Nabu-sum-usur, the seller of the field, (used) like his seal." A somewhat amusing incident affected the design of the Chinese money during the great Tang dynasty, about 618 A.D. A new and important issue of coinage was to be introduced, and the Secretary of the Censors himself moulded the design in wax, and humbly submitted it to the Empress Wen-teh for approval. She, through maladroitness, dug the end of her enormously long finger-nail into its face, marking it deeply as with a carpenter's gouge. The poor Secretary of the Censors, Ngeu-yang-siun, who deserves honour from professional courtiers, suppressing such sentiments as he must have felt when his work was mauled, accepted the nail-mark of the Empress as an interesting supplement to the design; he changed it into a crescent in relief, and the new coins were stamped accordingly. (See _Coins and Medals_, edited by Stanley Lane Poole, 1885, p. 221.) A drawing of one of these is given in Plate 1, Fig. 1. The European practitioners of palmistry and cheiromancy do not seem to have paid particular attention to the ridges with which we are concerned. A correspondent of the American Journal _Science_, viii. 166, states, however, that the Chinese class the striae at the ends of the fingers into "pots" when arranged in a coil, and into "hooks." They are also regarded by the cheiromantists in Japan. A curious account has reached me of negroes in the United States who, laying great stress on the possession of finger prints in wax or dough for witchcraft purposes, are also said to examine their striae.