HANDWRITING, Expert Analysis of. A mental image may be made either consciously and with attention to every detail, or with vary ing degrees of consciousness amounting in some cases to almost complete automatism, but it must in any case be largely influenced by the machine which produces it. No matter what rare may be employed to make two objects alike, a sufficiently minute inspection will always discern differences between them. It is from this fact we are able to distinguish a particu lar tone of a bell, a particular face, etc. All things, and notably those which owe their exist ence to organic life, are resultants of very com plex forces acting simultaneously or in sequence, and in comparing similar resultants it is ever found that quantitative or qualitative differences of the constituent forces employed in fashion.. ing them have occasioned differences in the objects themselves. Th..se differences may be indiscernible to the casual view, but will never fail to reveal themselves to an examination sufficiently searching.
The factors employed in making marks may be roughly divided into: A, the model in the mind which it is the intention to reproduce; and B, the mechanism by which the act is to be ac complished. Under the latter head there is to consider not only the permanent structure of the individual, which necessarily limits his per formance, but also the manner of employing this structure, which becomes a and the fluctuations, due to disease, drugs, variations of mood, increasing age, etc., in the motor im• pulses controlling it.
The basis of any sound judgment on the au• thorship of designs such as pictures or hand: writings depends upon the recognition of sorts of differences; which it is essential to dis tinguish from each other. In general, • designs by different authors differ in kind, while those of the same author differ in degree. The methods for distinguishing these two sorts of differences will be more particularly treated hereafter.
The general subject of the study of 'those characteristics which distinguish each hand writing from every other has been called Gram mapheny; the study of methods for detecting frauds relating to handwriting either in imi tating, altering or suppressing a record, is called Plassopheny; and the general study of the records of human thought, including their forms, their purport and the tools and materials by means of which they are produced is called Bibliotics.
Ever since the more or less permanent rec ords of human thought have had a value they have been the objects of falsification. It is not known to how great an extent this may have been practised in the hieroglyphic and ideo graphic carvings on stone, but doubtless inter polations were frequent in recording the deeds of their kings, and the sculptors imitated each other's style with a view of bettering their own; or each other's peculiarities to convey false im pressions as to the narrator.
But with the introduction of writing in pig ments on parchment and papyrus the greater facility with which alterations and erasures could be made immediately attracted the atten tion of the unscrupulous. According to his
torians the Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, As syrians and others practised garbling and forgery by erasing, resurfacing and bleaching manuscripts to change their purport, or give false impressions of their age and authorship. These depredations, then as now, were chiefly made upon manuscripts of persons absent or, more commonly, deceased; whole compositions which they never saw being ascribed to them. As an example may be cited the interpolation in the text of Josephus with which Eusebius has been charged. A host of epistles, papal de crees, productions of the Fathers and dogmat ical treatises were in early times altered, erased in part, and falsified from the original text, sometimes by learned and reverend scholars for the greater glory of the Church, and sometimes by obscure copyists from ignorance, or trifling incentives. Erasmus declared he knew of but a single important old manuscript which was not tainted by this kind of fraud. The methods of effacing the writing of a parchment multi plied in proportion to the increase of manu scripts and the cost of parchment. The prac tice of using such effaced parchments for other writings was common in the time of Cicero, as a letter from him to Trebatius testifies. Such writings were called palimpsests; and the cus tom of producing them gave dangerous ex perience to perpetrators of fraud in the art of effacing written characters by mechanical and chemical means. Plutarch speaks of this practice as one well known. As the price of parchment rose it began to be the habit in the early libraries to efface the letters from parch ments "of little value" in order to replace them by more valuable compositions. Dangerous as was such a rule at any time it became fatal to learning when the c:loice was in the hands of those who were inflamed against their adver saries in controversy, and against all "pagans,° in which class almost all the great authors of our classics were included, and willing to sacri fice the choicest thoughts of the Greeks and Romans in favor of the fanatical dissertations of those they were pleased to call the "faithful.° When the Caliph Omar put an end to the manufacture and sale of papyrus he caused a wholesale destruction of the writings in the libraries throughout the world. Many scholars believe that the world thus lost great stores of classical literature, the exact magnitude of which can never be ascertained or even estimated. (Consult Gustave Itasse, Faux devant l'histoire,) etc., from which much of the preceding is taken). According to Adolphe Bertillon (Revue Scien. 25, 4 Ser. Vol. VIII, 18 Dec. 1897) the first recorded student of bibliotics was Francois Demelle in 1609, and the first writer on the subject one Raveneau (1656). In his treatise the latter deplores the lack of science of his colleagues, which however did not prevent their landing him in jail for forgery.