ness of the
instruments employed and their liability to get out of order; (2) the
need for specially instructed measurers, men of superior education; (3)
the errors that frequently crept in when carrying out the processes and
were all but irremediable. Measures inaccurately taken, or wrongly read
off, could seldom, if ever, be corrected, and these persistent errors
defeated all chance of successful search. The process was slow, as it
was necessary to repeat it three times so as to arrive at a mean result.
In Bengal measurements were already abandoned by 1897, when the finger
print system was adopted throughout British India. Three years later
England followed suit; and as the result of a fresh inquiry ordered by
the Home Office, finger prints were alone relied upon for
identification.

AUTHORITIES.--Lombroso, _Antropometria di 400 delinquenti_ (1872);
Roberts, _Manual of Anthropometry_ (1878); Ferri, _Studi comparati di
antropometria_ (2 vols., 1881-1882); Lombroso, _Rughe anomale speciali
ai criminali_ (1890); Bertillon, _Instructions signaletiques pour
l'identification anthropometrique_ (1893); Livi, _Anthropometria_
(Milan, 1900); Furst, _Indextabellen zum anthropometrischen Gebrauch_
(Jena, 1902); _Report of Home Office Committee on the Best Means of
Identifying Habitual Criminals_ (1893-1894). (A. G.)

ANTHROPOMORPHISM (Gr. [Greek: anthropos], man, [Greek: morphae], form),
the attribution (a) of a human body, or (b) of human qualities
generally, to God or the gods. The word anthropomorphism is a modern
coinage (possibly from 18th century French). The _New English
Dictionary_ is misled by the 1866 reprint of Paul Bayne on Ephesians
when it quotes "anthropomorphist" as 17th century English. Seventeenth
century editions print "anthropomorphits," i.e. anthropomorphites, in
sense (a). The older abstract term is "anthropopathy," literally
"attributing human feelings," in sense (b).

Early religion, among its many objects of worship, includes beasts (see
ANIMAL-WORSHIP), considered, in the more refined theology of the later
Greeks and Romans, as metamorphoses of the great gods. Similarly we find
"therianthropic" forms--half animal, half human--in Egypt or
Assyria-Babylonia. In contrast with these, it is considered one of the
glories of the Olympian mythology of Greece that it believed in happy
manlike beings (though exempt from death, and using special rarefied
foods, &c.), and celebrated them