[Footnote: Dr. D. J. Macgowan, in Medical Reports of China. 1881.]
Two writers in _Nature_, both having for their theme "Skin-furrows on
the Hand," solicit information on the subject from China.[1] As the
subject is considered to have a bearing on medical jurisprudence and
ethnology as well, this report is a suitable vehicle for responding to
the demand.
[Footnote 1: Henry Faulds, Tzukiyi Hospital, Tokio, Japan. W. J.
Herschel, Oxford, England.--_Nature_, 28th October and 25th November,
1880.]
Dr. Faulds' observations on the finger-tips of the Japanese have an
ethnic bearing and relate to the subject of heredity. Mr. Herschel
considers the subject as an agent of Government, he having charge for
twenty years of registration offices in India, where he employed finger
marks as sign manuals, the object being to prevent personation and
repudiation. Doolittle, in his "Social Life of the Chinese," describes
the custom. I cannot now refer to native works where the practice of
employing digital rugæ as a sign manual is alluded to. I doubt if its
employment in the courts is of ancient date. Well-informed natives think
that it came into vogue subsequent to the Han period; if so, it is in
Egypt that earliest evidence of the practice is to be found. Just as the
Chinese courts now require criminals to sign confessions by impressing
thereto the whorls of their thumb-tips--the right thumb in the case of
women, the left in the case of men--so the ancient Egyptians, it
is represented, required confessions to be sealed with their
thumbnails--most likely the tip of the digit, as in China. Great
importance is attached in the courts to this digital form of signature,
"finger form." Without a confession no criminal can be legally executed,
and the confession to be valid must be attested by the thumb-print
of the prisoner. No direct coercion is employed to secure this; a
contumacious culprit may, however, be tortured until he performs the
act which is a prerequisite to his execution. Digital signatures are
sometimes required in the army to prevent personation; the general
in command at Wenchow enforces it on all his troops. A document thus
attested can no more be forged or repudiated than a photograph--not so
easily, for while the period of half a lifetime effects great changes
in the physiognomy, the rugæ of the fingers present the same appearance
from the cradle to the grave; time writes no wrinkles there. In the
army everywhere, when the description of a person is written down, the
relative number of volutes and coniferous finger-tips is noted. It
is called taking the "whelk striæ," the fusiform being called "rice
baskets," and the volutes "peck measures." A person unable to write, the
form of signature which defies personation or repudiation is required in
certain domestic cases, as in the sale of children or women. Often when
a child is sold the parents affix their finger marks to the bill of
sale; when a husband puts away his wife, giving her a bill of divorce,
he marks the document with his entire palm; and when a wife is sold, the
purchaser requires the seller to stamp the paper with hands and feet,
the four organs duly smeared with ink. Professional fortune tellers in
China take into account almost the entire system of the person whose
future they attempt to forecast, and of course they include palmistry,
but the rugæ of the finger-ends do not receive much attention. Amateur
fortune-tellers, however, discourse as glibly on them as phrenologists
do of "bumps"--it is so easy. In children the relative number of volute
and conical striæ indicate their future. "If there are nine volutes,"
says a proverb, "to one conical, the boy will attain distinction without
toil."
Regarded from an ethnological point of view, I can discover merely that
the rugæ of Chinamen's fingers differ from Europeans', but there is so
little uniformity observable that they form no basis for distinction,
and while the striæ may be noteworthy points in certain medico-legal
questions, heredity is not one of them.
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