the sort. I give here a list of the remaining signatures still in my possession, in case any may meet with recognition: F. Slight, Officer of the 'Mongolia', F. A. Owen, J. Watson, R. Hawkins, F. Wingrove, O. Westphal, J. W. Malet, G. S. Lynch, Mrs. Philip. It is only reasonable, I think, to believe that such a novel and evidently useful idea would have spread by their means wherever they went. My exhibition was frequently asked for, and I always gave a duplicate of his mark to each person, and sometimes added one of my own to show the extraordinary persistence of patterns after nigh twenty years.

Sir Alfred C. Lyall.

Capt. A. Coleman (P. & O. SS. 'Mongolia'), February, 1877.

On my return to India, my position as Magistrate and Collector at Hooghly, near Calcutta, gave me the control, not only of criminal courts, but of the jail, and of the modern Department for Registration of Deeds of all sorts, and among minor duties the payment of Government pensions. Registration, of course, appealed most strongly to my desires, but the Sub-Registrar and his clerks had to be trained, and meanwhile the few pensioners enabled me to break the ice myself. I was not a little anxious lest, officially introduced, Hindus might take alarm for their caste. The memory of the greased cartridges of the Mutiny, so near Hooghly, was indelible. In private experiments I had never met any such difficulty, but the old lesson had been a severe one, and I thought it well, when acting officially, to take every precaution. I was careful, therefore, from the first ostentatiously to employ Hindus to take the impressions wanted; using, as if a matter of course, the pad and the ink made by one of themselves from the very seed-oil and lamp-black which were in constant use for the office seals in the several departments.

The glad approval of the pensioners was a great pleasure to me, and made the other registration work astonishingly easy. The clerks took to it unhesitatingly, and enjoyed the fun of explaining the 'Sahib's hikmat'. No one ever hesitated to do as he was told, or to take away duplicates for talk at home. The process of registration at that time was regulated by a late law devised to afford the best security then possible for the genuineness of deeds, as far as attestation went. The signatures, whether in full or by caste mark, or by cross, or, in the case of women mostly, by touching the paper with the tip of the finger wetted with ink from the clerk's pen (see p. 35), were always made in the presence and under the eye of the Registrar, who, in most cases, had to rely on the sworn evidence of witnesses attesting their personal knowledge of the executant. The Registrar was, of course, responsible for using his intelligence in each case to prevent imposture. His part of the work was never impeached, that I know, in Bengal; nevertheless, fraudulent attempts did still come to light. Signatures were still denied; personations in presenting false deeds did take place, either to swindle, or, in one case, to fabricate an alibi. As long as I was at Hooghly I was quite satisfied that no will or other deed registered there with the new safeguard would ever be repudiated by the actual executant. I have had to think otherwise since then, because many years afterwards a man (in another district) who had given his finger-print before a Registrar repudiated it. He was summoned to give his evidence on oath. It was found that he had cut off the joints of his fingers, hoping to defeat justice by corrupting the witnesses so as to prove that he was not the man they had recognized before the Registrar. The High Court rejected the sworn story of an accident, and confirmed the facts of the registration, with the necessary consequence to the offender for his perjury. I do not know of any other repudiation having been pressed to this bitter end in India or elsewhere. The contrast between the inherent weakness of the old law and the efficiency of the new test could not be better exemplified. This case gave the first stern blow to the foul mischief that had developed such cruel proportions in India under cover of our conservative legal habits.

The way the new safeguard was applied at Hooghly in 1877 was thus:—After the legal formalities of registration had been observed, the Registrar made the person print his two fingers on the deed, and again in a diary book which was kept by him in the office, for my own inspection rather than as evidence. It is, no doubt, preserved at Hooghly still.

It was from this book that cuttings were made at my request in 1892 by Mr. Duke, the magistrate, which formed the subject of Sir Francis Galton's volume on 'Blurred Finger-prints' (1893), to which, for its cogency in marshalling the evidence, I must refer my readers. I annex a tracing of one of his enlargements, by permission of the London University, to which he left his great collection.

Bechā Rām Dās Adhikāri. From tracings by Mr. Galton of enlargements, (a) Made in 1877 when registering his deed; (b) made in 1892 for Mr. Galton.

Another form in which I made use of the new system for public purposes was in the jail. The common device of hiring a substitute to serve out a term was not unknown, but it involved a long risk of detection. A safer but very costly, and therefore rare, device was sham death and a purchased corpse, affording comparative safety after escape. A case of this kind, carried out with the aid of an irregularly appointed doctor, was strongly suspected by me at Hooghly.[4] The precaution I adopted was to take the finger-prints of each offender when passing sentence of imprisonment, both on the records of the Court and also on the warrant to the jailer.

All these processes were in full use when I left India, on the completion of twenty-five years' service, in 1878. I was by that time almost broken down in health, and more so in energy. Sir Ashley Eden, the Lieutenant-Governor, offered me a substantive Commissionership. I had already held such an appointment twice, and nothing but an honest sense of inability made me decline it now. I mention this in explanation of the slackness on my part, but for which the finger-print system would certainly have been put in force in the Registration Department, at least throughout Bengal, forty years ago. As it was, I only tried to induce the Inspector of Jails and the Registrar-General of the day to give the system a trial. Fortunately I kept an office copy of this letter, which, in reply to outside criticism, I published in 'Nature', Nov. 22, 1894, and repeat here to complete this narrative.