of measurement at the time of taking policies, there will be no likelihood of conspiracies for the purpose of illegally obtaining premiums. Drs. Smart and Greenleaf, of the Medical Department of the United States Army, have adopted a system which has its advantages, although it is less reliable than the Bertillon system. Fig. 60.-Some Classifications of the Form of the Ear. (Bertillon.) According to Smart and Greenleaf, desertions from the United States army are believed to greatly exceed deserters who are apt to repeat their offense. It is believed to be possible to detect such "repeaters" if the body-marks of all recruits are recorded, if all deserters are recorded, and if all recruits are compared with previous deserters. In like manner men discharged for cause should be excluded from reëntry. The originators of this plan do not believe in the value of Bertillon's method before courts-martial, because of possible inaccuracies and allowable errors, but only as a confirmatory proof when following coincident indelible marks, when height, age, and hair fairly correspond. In other words, Bertillon's collateral evidence is practically primary evidence. Smart and Greenleaf use for each man an outline-figure card, giving anterior and posterior surfaces, divided by dotted lines into regions, which are filed alphabetically at the Surgeon-General's office at Washington. As a man goes out for cause, or deserts, his card is filed separately, and the cards of recruits are compared with the last file. "To make this comparison, a register in two volumes is opened, one for light-eyed and one for dark-eyed men. Each is subdivided into a fair number of pages, according to height of entrance, and each page is ruled in columns for body regions. Tattooed and non-tattooed men of similar height and eyes are entered on opposite pages. Recruits without tattoos are not compared with deserters with tattoos; but recruits with tattoos are compared with both classes. On the register, S., T., B., M., etc., are used as abbreviations for scar, tattoo, birth-mark, mole, etc. One inch each side of recorded height allowed for variation or defective measurement. When probability of identity appears, the original card is used for comparison." IDENTITY AND SURVIVORSHIP. BY BENJAMIN N. CARDOZO. IT would seem, to the world of to-day, a strange, if not incredible, notion that there was a stage in the growth of law when personal identity was a problem of very limited concern. Yet it was so. That problem has not always existed to tax the energies of litigants and to perplex the minds of courts. Only with the gradual development of law has it emerged as a legal concept of permanent and paramount importance. It is a concept that had but little place in the most primitive stages of legal growth, for the identity of the individual was absorbed in the identity of the tribe. Vengeance, to be sure, was not unknown; vengeance, prompt and sharp and merciless, was exercised then as now; yet it was vengeance not merely on the perpetrator of the deed, but on his kinsmen, his family, his clan. There was no thought of this as a punishment vicarious in its nature. It did not present itself to those ages in such a light. The individual had no life apart from his clan; he had no legal status except beneath its sheltering care; and a sense of solidarity, unknown to future times, made each the agent of the other and each the guardian of all.* It is a slow and in many ways a curious history that marks the rise of this concept of personal identity from its crude beginnings to the commanding position which it holds to-day. There seems, indeed, to have been a sort of intermediate stage where the identity of the offending person was confused with the identity of the instrument through which the offense was perpetrated. It must be borne in mind throughout that the unit of society in primitive times is not the individual, but the family or clan.t Community of property, or rather perhaps the absence of any definite notion of property at all, tended still further to subtract from the individual's importance as the bearer of rights or the subject of duties. And so it is that private wrongs were wont to engender as their consequences, not merely private vengeance upon the offender, but vengeance upon his clan. The personality of the individual was merged in the personality of his tribe. The search after the identity of the offender was forgotten in the pursuit of the clan from which his station in the community was derived. And so we find that the first dim awakening of a sense that the individual offender should bear the * H. S. Maine, Ancient Law, p. 122. Ibid., pp. 121, 178. |