I’ve always had an interest in forensics in general, and fingerprints in specific. Previously, I had blogged about the FBI publication The Science of Fingerprints. Today, I noticed that another major work on the subject had been released by Project Gutenberg: Francis Galton’s Finger Prints.

Francis Galton was a prolific scientist in a number of fields. Half-cousin of Charles Darwin, he’s perhaps most famous for pioneering the field of eugenics, but he also was the first to create a system for the classification of fingerprints, and argued based upon statistics that fingerprints were unique.

Nice to see this online.