Plate 13 gives impressions taken from the fingers of a child of 2-1/2
years in 1877, and again in 1890, when a boy of 15. They are enlarged
photographically to the same size, and are therefore on different scales.
The impressions from the baby-hand are not sharp, but sufficiently
distinct for comparison. Every bifurcation, and beginning or ending of a
ridge, common to the two impressions, is marked with a numeral in blue
ink. There is only one island in the present instance, and that is in the
upper pair of prints; it is clearly seen in the right hand print, lying to
the left of the inscribed number 13, but the badness of the left hand
print makes it hardly decipherable, so it is not numbered. There are a
total of twenty-six good points of comparison common to the upper pair of
prints; there are forty-three points in the lower pair, forty-two of which
appear in both, leaving a single point of disagreement; it is marked A on
the fifth ridge counting from the top. Here a bifurcated ridge in the baby
is filled up in the boy. This one exception, small though it be, is in my
experience unique. The total result of the two pairs of prints is to
afford sixty-eight successes and one failure. The student will find it
well worth his while to study these and the following prints step by step,
to satisfy himself of the extraordinarily exact coincidences between the
two members of either of the pairs. Of course the patterns generally must
be the same, if the ridges composing them are exactly alike, and the most
cursory glance shows them to be so.
[Illustration: PLATE 14.
FIG. 21.]
Plate 14, Fig. 21 contains rather less than a quarter of each of eight
pairs that were published in the _Phil. Trans._ memoir above alluded to.
They were there enlarged photographically to twice their natural size,
which was hardly enough, as it did not allow sufficient space for
inserting the necessary reference numbers. Consequently they have been
again considerably enlarged, so much so that it is impossible to put more
than a portion of each on the page. However, what is given suffices. The
omitted portions may be studied in the memoir. The cases of ~1~ and ~2~
are prints of different fingers of the same individual, first as a child 8
years old, and then as a boy of 17. They have been enlarged on the same
scale but not to the same size; so the print of the child includes a
larger proportion of the original impression than that of the boy. It is
therefore only a part of the child's print which is comparable with that
of the boy. The remaining six cases refer to four different men, belonging
to three quite different families, although their surnames happen to have
the same initial, H. They were adults when the first print was made, and
from 26 to 31 years older on the second occasion. There is an exact
agreement throughout between the two members of each of the eight several
couplets.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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