3.1 Fingerprints: History, Importance, Classification

The history: the ancient use (the clay impressions); the 19th-century science (the Galton-and- Henry systems — the classification's birth; the first forensic identifications' era). The importance: the individuality (no two persons' prints identical — the biology's ridge patterns fixed before birth); the permanence (the lifetime's constancy); the economy (the cheap, the rapid, the recordable — the databases' world). The classification (the exam's core): the three fundamental patterns — the arch (the plain-and-tented), the loop (the ulnar-and-radial — the core-and-delta's counting), the whorl (the plain, central-pocket, double-loop, accidental); the Henry classification's filing logic (the primary-and-secondary divisions — the ten-print card's world); the modern AFIS/ABIS (the automated searching — the database's identification in minutes).