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GALTON, Francis.(William Huggins, J.J. Thomson, others.) "Methods of indexing Finger Mark", in "Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, London, Harrison & Sons, 1891, volume 49; viii,558,32pp. Half-calf over linen boards. There is some amount of scuffing to the spine. Provenance: University College of Wales, with a bookplate, a library call number on the front board, and small rubberstamps on the title page. G-VG copy. [++] There are a number of interesting contributions in this volume, one of the most significant being the Galton paper appearing on pp 540-545. "Galton s establishment of fingerprinting as an easy and almost infallible means of human identification transformed a difficult subject, and his taxonomy of prints is basically that used today. He was disappointed, however, to find no familial, racial, moral, or intellectual subgroupings in the collections he examined.--"Galton, Francis" Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography, vol. 5, Charles Scribner's Sons, 2008, pp. 265-267. [++] Also of note: J.J. Thomson, "On the Rate of Propagation of the Luminous Discharge of Electricity Through a Rarefied Gas", pp 84-100. [++] William Marcet, " On the Chemical Phenomena of Human Respiration while Air is being re-breathed in a Closed Vessel", pp 103-115. [++] William and Mrs/ Huggins, "On Wolf and Rayet's Bright-Line Stars in Cygnus", pp 33-46. 325. [++] "Galton came to study fingerprints in a roundabout way. In 1880, a physician named Henry Faulds asked Charles Darwin for some help in documenting some important properties of fingerprints. For example, Faulds suspected but did not know how to demonstrate that no two people have the same fingerprints. Darwin was too old to take on this task, and so he recommended his younger cousin, Francis Galton. Galton took the task very seriously and imparted on a series of empirical studies that allowed him to document not only that no two people have the same fingerprints but also that a person's fingerprints remain largely unchanged over the course of his or her life. While he was at it, Galton also developed the first system for classifying and identifying fingerprints."--American Psychological Association website ("To Catch a Thief".
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