-Experts Held Competent to Testify in Court--Bank Officials
and Employes Favored--An Expert On Signatures--Methods Experts Employ
to Identify the Work of the Pen--Where and When an Expert's Services
Are Needed--Large Field and Growing Demand for Experts--Qualifications
of a Handwriting Expert--How the Work Is Done--A Good Expert
Continuously Employed--The Expert and the Charlatan--Qualifying as
an Expert--A System Which Produces Results--Principal Tests Applied
by Handwriting Experts to Determine Genuineness--Identification of
Individual by His Handwriting--How to Tell Kind of Ink and Process
Used to Forge a Writing--Rules Followed by Experts in Determining
Cases--The Testimony of a Handwriting Expert--Explaining Methods
Employed to Detect Forged Handwriting--The Courts and Experts--What
an Expert May Testify to--Trapping a Witness--Proving Handwriting
by Experts--General Laws Regulating Experts--The Base Work of a
Handwriting Expert--Important Facts an Expert Begins Examination
With--A Few Words of Advice and Suggestion About "Pen Scope"--Detection
of Forgery Easy If Rules Suggested Are Observed--Expert Witnesses,
Courts, and Jurors.

There is no rule of law fixing the precise amount of experience or
degree of skill necessary to constitute a handwriting expert. The
witness need not be engaged in any particular business or claim to be
a professional expert. He must, however, claim to have experience.
With that limitation, cashiers, paying tellers, other bank officers,
attorneys, bookkeepers, business men, conveyancers, county officials,
photographers, treasurers and clerks of railroads, etc., and writing
teachers have in various cases been held competent to testify as an
expert. And it has been held that experience with handwriting
generally or specially will enable the witness to testify specially or
generally thereto. Bank officials, and especially cashiers, tellers,
and book-keepers, are usually regarded as competent by most courts to
pass authoritatively upon handwriting.

Generally speaking, the witness must claim to be an expert, or at
least show that he had the means of gaining experience. He need not
claim to be an expert, but he must claim to have had such experience
as will make him feel competent to express an opinion.

He may always give the reasons for his opinion, but he must confine
his testimony to his opinion based on the handwriting itself, and not
as affected by the facts of the case. He cannot s