on special duty in H.M.S. 'President', he kindly gave me (not for the first time) a repeat, this time at the age of 38. The baby print bears enlargement beautifully, and I am sure my readers will be delighted with the comparison I am thus able to lay before them.

One of the prints I value most, on personal grounds, is that of Sir Theodore Hope, at that time in the Legislative Council of India for Bombay. I grieve to say he has died since these words were written. He was one of my most honoured college friends in the old Haileybury days of 1853.

W. F. Courthope.

Among the last prints that I took in India were two at Mussoorie, in the Punjab Himālayas, in Sept. 1877; one of my brother Colonel J. Herschel, R.E., and one of Dr. J. F. Duthie, of the Forest Department. They are both living still, and their repeats to-day are quite good.

CAPTAIN V. H. HAGGARD, R. N.

To return now to my letter of 1877. I was 'able to say that these marks do not change in the course of ten or fifteen years'. I might have said eighteen years, for my own marks reached back to 1859; but I was steering for safety.

The conviction of the unchanging character of finger-patterns had, of course, grown on me only by degrees, as the evidence of time accumulated. Among my friends, from Nuddea days onwards, I often took second impressions, invariably drawing attention to their identity with the former ones. I never came upon any sign of change, bar accident. But such comparisons were generally limited to intervals of no more than two or three years, owing to the frequent changes of residence incidental to Indian service. As time went on it was chiefly the incessant evidence of my own ten fingers, and of my whole hand, which wrought in me the overwhelming conviction that the lines on the skin persisted indefinitely.

Colonel J. Herschel, Sept. 22, 1877.

J. F. Duthie, 1877.

But besides my own evidence of eighteen years, I had that of my oldest college friend, William Waterfield, of almost as long. On March 31, 1877, he and Mr. (afterwards Sir Theodore) Hope and Mrs. Hope were my guests at Hooghly. I took all their impressions and my own on that day, noting on Waterfield's that we compared it with his earliest print of 1860, in Nuddea, seventeen years earlier. We found the agreement, of course, complete. Here are the facsimiles.

T. C. Hope, Bo.C.S., at Hooghly, 1877.

W. Waterfield.

If more evidence were required, I was prepared, without hesitation, to call on any person whose mark I had taken since I began. It was in fact from among those very persons, Natives as well as English, that thirteen years later, at Mr. Galton's request, I obtained the repeats which, by their much longer persistence then, went so far to prove his case to universal conviction.

I close this record with a comparison between three of my own prints, taken, one in 1859, one in 1877, and the last to-day, after fifty-seven years. For length of persistence they cannot at present be matched.

(a) (b) W. J. H., 1859, Arrah (aet. 26).
(c) W. J. H., March 31, 1877 (aet. 44).
(d) W. J. H., February 22, 1916 (aet. 83).

It goes beyond the proper scope of this narrative, but I cannot refrain from offering my readers here a striking instance of the almost incredible persistency of atomic renovation that takes place in the pads of our fingers, in spite of their being more subject to wear than any other part of the body. The first was taken at the age of 7¾; the next, for Mr. Galton, nine years later. In 1913 my son was in Canada when I asked him to send me several repeats. Every print showed the minute tell-tale dot which Mr. Galton's sharp eye had noticed twenty-two years before. No doubt it was a natal mark. It has anyhow already persisted for thirty-two years.