Listening  (Page 2/4)

Right! Now go ahead and practise your scene to present to the class.

Unwritten Signature

1. In 1431 a young woman declared to be a sorceress was burned at the stake in Rouen, France. The English judges who tried Jeanne d’Arc, the Maid of France, believed that only evil powers could have made her victorious at the head of the French army. Burning had been thought the proper death for witches and traitors for centuries.

2. But was it Joan of Arc who died at the stake? There are stories, with some records to support them, that Joan was alive for about twenty years after she was supposed to have been burned. She is said to have become the wife of Robert des Armoises, a knight of Lorraine, in the northeast corner of France.

3. In the 1900s the claim of Jeanne des Armoises could have been settled with no trouble. Nowadays anyone charged with a crime and put into prison is fingerprinted. If fingerprints had been recorded for Joan of Arc and had proved to match those of Jeanne des Armoises, her claim of identity would have been allowed. Had the prints not matched, Jeanne des Armoises would have been proved an impostor.

4. How can a person’s identity be proved in this way? The answer is that no two people with identical fingerprints have yet been found. Scientists calculate that there is only one chance in millions of millions that two people might have identical prints.

5. Dactyloscopy (from the Greek daktylos, finger, and –skopia, observation) may be called a young science. But knowledge of fingerprint differences is very old. Thousands of years ago, the emperor of China marked his thumbprint on orders as proof of their authority. Diggers in modern Jordan found “signed” pottery made some three thousand years ago. The fingerprints on the wine jars and other clay items were so clear that the finders were able to sort out each potter’s work. Through the centuries, and even today, people of the East have used fingerprint signatures. And Eastern practices, ancient and recent, led to the science of dactyloscopy in the West.

6. The two men who awakened European interest in the science of fingerprinting were Britons who were working in Asia. Both wrote reports that appeared in the magazine Nature in 1880.

7. The first report in Nature was by Henry Faulds, a Scot who was a medical missionary in Japan. Faulds had noticed fingerprint markings on ancient Japanese pottery. His curiosity about these led

him to experiment. By removing skin from fingertips and allowing it to grow again, he proved that the pattern for each finger was distinctive, unlike any other. He discovered that the clearest imprint resulted from using damp paper and a film of printer’s ink. And, because he could imagine as well as observe, Faulds made an important suggestion: bloody finger marks at the scene of a crime might help the police to identify a criminal.

8. Sir William Herschel was the second Briton to report in Nature. He added more proof that fingerprints were unchangeable and distinctive. Working in Calcutta, India, Herschel had learned that Chinese coolies used fingerprint signatures. He applied their practice to Indian affairs. He required people receiving government wages or pensions to “sign” with the left thumb for each payment. He also began to register the prints of those sentenced to prison, to make sure that no impostor could be paid by the criminal to take his place.