!! spellx done
167  Facilities Still Primitive For Tracing Fingerprints
     The Washington Post   Saturday, September 6, 1969

     The fingerprint is an expression of the unique quality of each
individual which has been recognized for millennia.  The authoritative
book on "Finger Prints, Palms and Soles" by Harold Cummins and
Charles Nidlo, which is still fresh and useful 26 years after its
first publication, shows a Chinese clay seal with a clear thumb
print that dates at least as far back as the third century B.C.
Petter's clay would obviously have been an excellent medium in which
to recognize these characteristic impressions.

     The systematic use of fingerprints for personal identification,
however, dates to the publication of a note in Nature magazine by
Henry Faulds in 1880 and the development during the following 20 years
of a practical system of classifying the various patterns.  The
English geneticist Francis Galton laid the groundwork for establishing
the principles that fingerprint patterns are immutable during the
lifetime of an individual and that no two individuals, even "identical
twins", would have identical fingerprints.

     Since 1900, fingerprints have become an indispensable tool for
criminal investigation and personal identification.  In addition, few
people can escape some fascination with an attribute that smacks of
a scientific stereotype of an individual's soul.  In the
circumstances, it is surprising how little we know of the biological
basis of the human fingerprint and how primitive are the facilities
available to the police for using fingerprints for the apprehension
of criminals.

     The largest file of fingerprints is the FBI's records on over
62 million citizens in the Civil Service and the armed forces and 16
million connected with arrests.  A print from a single finger, or
even part of one, could tag or exclude an individual in comparison
with a given record.  It is a mistake to believe, however, that a
single print enables the FBI to trace a culprit through its huge
files.

     These are organized by the "Henry system", which depends on the
major patterns (arches, whorls or loops) on each of the ten fingers
as the first and major breakdown of the file.  Tens or hundreds of
thousands of records must then be examined visually for the details
of the prints that characterize each individual.

     Law enforcement agencies do keep smaller special files of latent
prints, often classified according to various types of crimes indulged
in by habitual offenders.

     In a report by the Institute for Defense Analyses for the
Katzenbach crime commission, Dr. Thomas C. Bartee pointed out the
advantages of establishing a more rational classification of
fingerprint records to facilitate the use of computers for
identification.

     In principle, computers should also be used for the direct
examination of the original prints, but this appears to be
uneconomical at this time in comparison with visual inspection.
Nevertheless, the use of computer pattern-recognition, along lines
similar to the large-scale processing of photographs of particle
tracks generated in high-energy physics work, should be invaluable
in fingerprint classification.

     The efficient design of a modern classification system must be
based on further studies of the statistics of different detailed
characteristics.  Studies following Dr. Bartee's recommendations are
evidently under way for law enforcement needs.  It would be a mutual
loss if they did not also take into account a growing interest in the
biomedical aspects of fingerprints and the related patterns found
on the palms and soles, all of which go under the name of 
dermatoglyphs.
---------------------------------------------------------------------