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The article focuses on the value of digital impressions as an effective and irrefutable means of establishing identity during searching for the antecedents of suspects of the criminal classes. Finger-prints may be described briefly as unerring and unvarying sign-manuals which admit of being so classified as to afford any easy clue to the discovery of the name and also the record of a person who withholds or falsifies it. The pattern is an Arch "when the ridges in the centre run from one side to the other without assuming a backward turn or twist; it is a Loop when there is a single backward turn but no twist; and a Whorl when there is a turn through at least one circle or a double turn in the form of a duplex spiral. The Finger-Print System was systematically introduced into the Northern Provinces of the Protectorate of Nigeria, the largest and the most ethologically diversified of the West African Colonies, some ten years ago. There is a definite absence of digital type variation amongst English offenders of the various classes, and this tends to confirm the generally accepted axiom that the true criminal instinct is fortuitous and its subsequent development contingent upon adverse social or moral circumstances.