Mr. DULLES. How old is the art, roughly? Mr. LATONA. Insofar as this country is concerned, I would say back to 1903, when the first fingerprint file for purposes of classification and filing was set up in this country in New York. Mr. DULLES. Did it start in France? Mr. LATONA. No. Really, I daresay the English were probably as early as any, or even down to South America--you have in Argentina the setting up of fingerprint files as early as 1891. For a long time we never recognized the fact that Argentina had a fingerprint file. I think it is primarily because all of the works on fingerprinting were written in Spanish, and it was just a question of finding somebody to take the time and effort to translate it into English. The French are credited with the so-called Bertillon system, which is a measurement of the bone structure of the body. Alphone Bertillon was a French---- Mr. DULLES. Didn't Bertillon go into fingerprints later? Mr. LATONA. Very reluctantly. He was very reluctant to accept it. He was a sort of diehard. He felt that his method, the measurement of certain bones of the body, would not change after a person reached the adult stage. But we know that that is not true. There is a change--because of age, disease, dissipation. A person that was once 6'2" may, because of the fact he is getting older, hump down a little more and instead of being 6'2" he might be 5'11". Certain bone structures over the years make certain changes--plus the fact that his system was not a good system in that certain allowances had to be made because of the way that people were measured. Sometimes one operator might measure the bones of the arm, for example, too tight, and another too loose. And they used the metric system of measurement, which in terms of their measuring might sometimes mean that the same person would not measure the same bone the same way twice. We have the celebrated case here which we refer to as the Will West case, here in the United States, in which a man was sentenced to the penitentiary in Leavenworth. He was a colored man by the name of Will West. The operator there, going through the mechanics of taking the various measurements and his photograph, said, "I see you are back here again." The man said, "No, this is the first time I have been to Leavenworth." The operator was certain he had measured and photographed this man before. He went to check his records and he came up with a prior record which disclosed a Will West who had practically the same Bertillon measurements as the man currently being examined. He said, "Isn't this you?" And he showed him a picture. He looked at the picture and recognized the picture as being one of himself. He said, "Yes, that is me, but I have never been here before."