ertical. Its characteristic is an
undulating serpentine waviness. Little or no distinction is made between
barred or looped letters. There are no rounded shoulders to the _m_ and
_n_ and the word minnie would be written by five small _u_'s. In
round-bodied letters like _a_, _d_, _g_, the circle is rarely completed,
but is left open, so that small _a_ becomes _u_, and small _d_ may be
mistaken for _it_, with the _i_ undotted and _t_ uncrossed. Despite its
geometrical and caligraphic inaccuracy in detail, this hand is generally
written with great regularity, that is, the characters, though
incomplete, are always uniform in their irregularity. The _e_ is never
open, but is an undotted _i_, and _n_ is _u_, but when the peculiarities
of the writer become familiar this hand is often very legible.

_Flat Hand._--A flat hand is a type of handwriting in which the
characters have an oblate or flattened appearance, the _o_, _a_, _g_,
&c., being horizontal ovals, like the minim and breve in music. The
tails and tops are generally short, with wide loops. It is nearly always
a vertical hand.

An _Eccentric Hand_ is one that presents various marked peculiarities
and departures from standard rules in the formation of certain letters,
and cannot be placed in any recognised class, though it may approximate
to one more than to another.

The _Round_ or _Clerical Hand_ is a writing that preserves a close
affinity for the round regular hand of the average school-boy, with the
difference that while the characters are formed on regular copybook
model, the hand is written with considerable fluency and firmness. It is
generally only a little out of the perpendicular, sloping slightly
towards the right.

CHAPTER V.

HOW TO EXAMINE A WRITING.

The examination of a writing generally consists in making a careful
comparison between it and another or others, the object being to
determine whether all are by the same hand.

The writing which is in a known hand or as to the authorship of which
there is no doubt, is usually called the Original, and is always
referred to by this name. The writing which has to be compared with it,
and which practically forms the subject of the enquiry, is called the
Suspect. The Suspects should be marked A, B, C, D, &c., and put away
without examination until the Original has been thoroughly mastered.
This is more important than may appear at first sight, for the confusing
effect of having the two types of