s witnesses in
court cases that often involve enormous sums of money, or the liberty
or even the lives of suspected malefactors, has awakened widespread
interest in the methods of this class of experts, their resources and
capabilities in conserving the ends of justice.

Many uninformed people appear to look on the handwriting expert as one
who, by intuition or the possession of some mysterious occult power,
is enabled to distinguish at a glance the true and the spurious in any
questioned handwriting. Nothing could be further from the fact.

The secret of his power--as in any other line of scientific
research--lies wholly in his intimate familiarity with the innumerable
physical details which comprise the written line or word or
letter--sometimes so slight a matter as the dotting of an _i_ or the
placing of a comma. It is precisely the same specialized sense, born
of acute observation and minute scrutiny that enables an expert
chemist to take two powders of like weight and color, identical in
appearance to the common eye and perhaps in taste to the common
palate, and say: This drug is harmless, wholesome; that is a deadly
poison--and to specify not only their various individual constituents
but the exact proportion of each. The trained eye of the handwriting
expert (as in another case could that of the expert chemist) can often
detect at a glance certain distinguishing earmarks of submitted
writing that enable him to fix the identity of the writer almost
off-hand. In the the great majority of cases, however, the cunning of
the forger calls for deliberate, painstaking study and investigation
before the conscientious expert is willing to announce with absolute
surety an opinion so often fraught with tremendous possibilities for
good or for evil.

Nothing else that a person does is so characteristic as the
handwriting, and the identification of the individual can be
established by it better than by portraits or almost any other means.
As lawyers and laymen and courts are finding this out, the handwriting
expert is more and more called upon to untangle snarled questions and
to right wrongs.

It is only when attention is directed to this interesting science by
the wide publicity given to some great case in which handwriting plays
an important part that the notice of the general public is drawn to
it. The average person would be surprised to know of the great number
of cases that find their way to the office of the handw