Vucetich on Galton

Vucetich’s admiration for a colleague

“What are you reading darling? Could you please just lift up those heavy books for a moment so I can wipe your side table? Oh, I hate that you smoke in here Juan. One day, you and all your books will stand ablaze.” “Honey, I am not merely reading. I am connecting with Sir Franics Galton, my brother in thought, my brother in crime, one could even say.” “Brother in crime? Juan, what…?” No no, do not worry honey, I am not engaging in any criminal activities. Quite the opposite, Sir Francis Galton made outstanding achievements in the forensic field and after reading his biography, I am not surprised he came to fame. By the age of two this prodigy child was able to read and when he was five he already knew some Latin. Later in life, he went on to study medicine and became an enthusiastic traveler. Among exotic countries like Damascus, Beirut and Egypt he also travelled to my beloved motherland Croatia. 

However, the one specific trait which led him to become a scientific polymath was his penchant for measuring, comparing and identifying patterns.  He excelled in mathematics, meteorology, statistics and geography. It was only when his cousin, who was no less a figure than Charles Darwin, published his Theory of Species that Galton dedicated his life to one specific field, namely, the hereditary of human ability. To paraphrase it, he wanted to scientifically proof that intelligent parents have intelligent children. 

While this is all very fascinating, his findings in the forensic field are those which I was most impressed by. Sir Francis Galton was the first to scientifically prove the uniqueness of human fingerprints, convincing courts to accept them as evidence. On top of that he identified eight common patterns in fingerprints and drew up a system to classify them. In doing so he made fingerprinting implementable. Nowadays, when trying to match a crime scene fingerprint with one that is already in the database, one does not have to go through all the fingerprint cards anymore. When the crime scene fingerprint has a loop I can already narrow my search down to a small fraction and after taking subcategories into account I am usually quick to find a match. You remember the mysterious Rojas case? You know, the woman that strangled her two poor children? I could not have solved it without Galton’s fingerprinting classification technique. [400]