Review

The article is devoted to the establishment of the doctrine of human hands fingerprint – fingerprinting. History of using papillary traces patterns for agreements confirmation in ancient Babylon, China, Egypt and further for offenders identification up to 1900s have been studied. The contribution to the development of fingerprinting of M. Malpighi, J. Purkyne, W. Herschel, H. Faulds, F. Galton, H. Vuchetich and others have been analysed.

Fingerprinting studies the properties and structure of papillary lines and methods of it’s detection, fixation, seizure and investigation for identification purpose. Nowadays fingerprinting is widely used in criminalistics, but initially it remained unnoticed. History of this science has got powerful impetus thanks to two authors – William Herschel and Henry Faulds. They had independently hypothesized the possibility of identification by fingerprints and published their research in the British scientific journal "Nature" in 1880. British anthropologist Francis Galton generalized their researches, classified variation of papillary lines in a single system. He became well-known in criminalistics as the founder of person identification by fingerprint. Huan Vuchetich was the first, who gave name to the new identification method – Fingerprinting.

Fingerprint registration system was first implemented in law enforcement bodies of Great Britain in 1895. It have been expanded in Argentina (1896), British India (1897), England (1900), Austria, Denmark, Hungary (1902), Germany, Brazil, Chile (1903), Russia, Bolivia (1906), Peru, Paraguay, Uruguay (1908) and later in other countries.

Keywords: fingerprint, fingerprinting, identification, papillary lines, trasologii.