The Evolution of Forensic Science
27
“Have you read Gaboriau’s works?” I asked. “Does Lecoq come up to your
idea of a detective?” … Sherlock Holmes sniffed sardonically. “Lecoq was a
miserable bungler.” He said in an angry voice; “he had only one thing to
recommend him, and that was his energy. That book made me positively
ill. I could have done it in twenty-four hours. Lecoq took six months or so.
It might be made a textbook for detectives to teach them what to avoid.”
In fact, in Poe’s stories, written before the word detective existed, we find
several foretellings of forensic concepts that Doyle embellishes for his own
stories. It is unlikely to be incidental that Poe establishes Dupin in France,
the birthplace of Alphones Bertillon, Edmund Locard, and
others comprising
a veritable forensic dynasty. He also gives due derision to Eugène François
Vidocq, a reformed Parisian criminal, who in 1810 established the first inves-
tigative unit ever.
The results attained by them are not unfrequently surprising, but for the
most part, are brought about by simple diligence and activity. When these
qualities are unavailing, their schemes fail. Vidocq, for example, was a good
guesser, and the persevering man. But, without educated thought, he erred
continually by the very intensity of his investigations. He impaired his vision
by holding the object too close. He might see, perhaps, one or two points
with
unusual clearness, but in so doing he, necessarily, lost sight of the
matter as a whole. (Poe, 1841)
In Poe’s
The
Murders in the Rue Morgue
, we find possibly the first refer-
ence to asking the right question, “It should not be so much asked ‘what has
occurred,’ as ‘what has occurred that has never occurred before.’” We also
find the forerunner to the famous Holmesian quote “When you have elimi-
nated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbably, must be the
truth” in Dupin’s “because here it was, I knew, that
all apparent impossibilities
must be proved to be not such in reality.” Perhaps the most prescient concept
introduced by Poe was the application of statistics to the interpretation of
forensic results.
Coincidences, in general, are great stumbling-blocks in the way of that class
of thinkers who have been educated to know nothing of the theory of
probabilities — that theory to which the most glorious objects of human
research are indebted for the most glorious of illustration. (Poe, 1841)
And one can’t help but notice the element of the pipe, complete with drifting
smoke, introduced in “The Purloined Letter” (Poe, 1845).
Although not known primarily for detective stories per se, Mark Twain
(a.k.a. Samuel Clemens) immediately capitalized on one of the most impor-
tant
developments in police science, individualization using fingerprints. In
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28
Principles and Practice of Criminalistics
The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson
, written in 1894, a lawyer with a hobby of
collecting fingerprints exonerated twin brothers by showing that bloody
prints on a knife were not theirs. From his descriptions, it is quite clear that
Twain had carefully studied the theories and capabilities of fingerprints. At
least one source indicates that, in 1892, while the details of the plot were still
evolving, Twain acquired a copy of
Finger Prints
, by Francis Galton, and
decided to feature fingerprints in the story (Railton, 1998). His proficient
use of them in this story certainly predates their
wide use and general accep-
tance by several years at least.
The fad without a name was one which dealt with people’s finger marks.
He carried in his coat pocket a shallow box with grooves in it, and in the
grooves strips of glass five inches long and three inches wide. Along the
lower edge of each strip was pasted a slip of white paper. He asked people
to pass their hands through their hair (thus collecting upon them a thin
coating of the natural oil) and then making a thumb-mark on a glass strip,
following it with the mark of the ball of each finger in succession.… Some-
times he copied on paper the involved and delicate pattern left by the ball
of the finger, and then vastly enlarged it with a pantograph so that he could
examine its web of curving lines with ease and convenience.
…Every human being carries with him from his cradle to his grave
certain physical marks which do not change their character, and by which
he can always be identified — and that without shade of doubt or question.
These
marks are his signature, his physiological autograph, so to speak, and
this autograph can not be counterfeited, nor can he disguise it or hide it
away, nor can it become illegible by the wear and mutations of time. This
signature is not his face — age can change that beyond recognition; it is
not his hair, for that can fall out; it is not his height, for duplicates of that
exist; it
is not his form, for duplicates of that exist also, whereas this signature
is each man’s very own — there is no duplicate of it among the swarming
populations of the globe! One twin’s patterns are never the same as his
fellow twin’s patterns … there was never a twin born in to this world that
did not carry from birth to death a sure identifier in this mysterious and
marvelous natal autograph.
Interestingly, unlike the other two authors mentioned, Twain reserves his
literary license for the story, sticking strictly to the
limitations of the tech-
nique in his use of fingerprints. Clemens also used fingerprints to further
the plot in
Life on the Mississipp
i, in which a thumbprint is used to identify
a murderer (Thorwald, 1964).
As we will see in subsequent sections, even the most revered of our
forensic forefathers succumbed to an occasional indulgence in overinterpre-
tation. Under the current microscope of ever-increasing scrutiny, the current
trend is to step back from leaps of intuition. In some cases, this
has led to
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The Evolution of Forensic Science
29
an overreaction in the opposite direction, with technical specialists retreating
to a corner of the laboratory to provide an isolated analysis of a lone piece
of evidence. We suggest that a balance between these two extremes might be
achieved by interpreting the evidence with appropriate limitations and in the
context of the case.
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