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fingerprints, so they approached him for help. Faulds took the suspect’s fingerprints and compared them with those discovered at the scene. It was quickly apparent that the two sets of prints were entirely different and as a result the man was released. A few days later another suspect was arrested; this time the prints did match and the culprit quickly confessed to the crime.
    Faulds published his first paper on the subject of fingerprints in the scientific journal
Nature.
In it he discussed theirusefulness in establishing identity and proposed the method of recording them in ink. When Herschel returned from India and heard about Faulds’s work, he was convinced that “his” discovery had been stolen. Strong letters were exchanged through
Nature.
In reality both men independently did their part to advance fingerprinting (or dactyloscopy, to give it its proper name) as a method of identification.
    When Faulds later returned to the United Kingdom from Japan in 1886, he explained his ideas to the Metropolitan Police. They were dismissed. He then wrote to just about anyone he thought would listen, including Charles Darwin. Although Darwin was interested, he felt he was too old and ill to get involved in the matter himself. Instead, he passed the information to his cousin, Francis Galton, who was interested in anthropology. Galton was a sportsman, explorer, meteorologist, and psychologist. He was also a believer in Bertillon’s system of identification. Not only had he given a lecture on
bertillonage
to the Royal Institution, but he had also visited Bertillon himself in Paris. Although Bertillon’s system impressed him, he found it too complicated. He saw the potential of fingerprints as an easier method of identification, but did not yet properly involve himself in the emerging field—he simply forwarded Faulds’s communication to the Anthropological Society of London. When he returned to the topic some years later, Galton, having heard of William Herschel’s reputation in the field, made contact with him rather than Faulds. Galton and Herschel got on well, as a result of which Herschel handed over all his material to Galton, who set about establishing fingerprints as the major system of identification in forensic terms.
    He needed to develop a proper system of classification. Heknew that it was essential for any such system to be simple—previous attempts at clarification had been very complicated and this was certainly one of the reasons that the authorities remained dubious about putting fingerprinting into practice. Galton began to observe recurring shapes and configurations of lines and that most fingerprints are centered around a “triangle” where the ridges run together. These triangles are called deltas and fall into four basic patterns: no triangle, triangle on the left, triangle on the right, more than one triangle. In 1891, Galton published a paper discussing his findings on fingerprints in
Nature.
In it, much to Faulds’s fury, he acknowledged his debt to Herschel but made no mention of Faulds. The following year he published his first book on the subject,
Finger Prints.
In it he demonstrated that the chance of a “false positive” (two different individuals having the same fingerprints) was about 1 in 64 billion. It was an extraordinary piece of work and influenced the then home secretary (later prime minister) Herbert Asquith, who was at the time considering introducing the
bertillonage
system to Britain.
    As a result of reading Galton’s book, Asquith established a committee to examine both systems in detail. He appointed a Home Office official named Charles Edward Troup to head the inquiry, supported by Major Arthur Griffiths (famous for his book
Mysteries of Police and Crime)
and Sir Melville Macnaghten, who was to become an assistant commissioner of the London Metropolitan Police. Although they liked the idea of fingerprinting because of the