Striking as has been the success of M. Bertillon's system of anthropometrical measurements as a means of identification, it has been altogether surpassed in certainty by the methods of recording the impressions of the fingers. From time to time in the past use has been made of a finger or thumb impression as a seal or to give a personal mark of authenticity to a document. One of the earliest examples extant of the use of the manual seal is to be seen on one of the Assyrian clay tablets in the British Museum.
This is imprinted in cuneiform characters, and contains a notice of the sale of a field, which concludes with the imprint of a finger nail, and the statement that this had been made by the seller of the field as his nail mark.
Similar imprints of nails are to be seen upon Chinese coins, as has been pointed out by Sir Francis Galton, and a tradition has it that they were first put there as a compliment to an early Chinese Empress who had accidentally pressed her finger nail into the wax model of a coin that had been submitted for her approval. The ancient Egyptians caused criminals to seal their confessions with finger nails.
There are also numerous instances in which impressions of finger-tips are found upon documents, but these do not seem to have been put there with any idea of identification, but rather to have been of the nature of a ceremonial observance comparable with the legal survival of putting a finger upon the seal of a document, and delivering it as "my act and deed."
The first attempt by Europeans to make use of the characteristic ridges of the fingers to record the identity of individuals appears to have been that of Sir William Herschel, who introduced a method officially into Bengal.
His system arose out of the difficulty of checking forgeries by the natives in India, and his having made two of them record their finger impressions upon contracts, so that he might be able to frighten them should they subsequently deny their signatures.
This was in 1858, and the device proved so unexpectedly successful that for several years Sir William Herschel made a study of the use of finger-prints in identification, and finally found them so satisfactory that, in 1877, he gave instructions for their systematic use in the Hooghly.