The Russellville Democrat., 1881-11-17
HANDWRITING.
Some Carlous Facts About Letters and
 Manuscripts.

I
 Manuscripts.
 "Yes, 1 am an expert, if you call one an expert who has passed fourteen years of his life pouring over specimens of handwriting with magnifying glass In that time a blind man would know something about the peculiarities of pen manship."
 This was the remark of MT. Henry Sevier, whose home is in Philadelphia, where he combines the avocations of a conveyancer and a writing expert, and it has frequently happened in the past few years that he has been called on to make long journeys through the country to aid in determining the genuineness of hand writing.
 Are there many experts in the coun- try?"
 "No; there are generally one or two in each large city who have taken up the study of handwriting for the pleasure and interest which they find in it, but as far as real experts go 1 don't think that there are more than three in Amer ica; the others are amateurs certainly with considerable knowledge, but still only amateurs"
 "What is the first step you take when piece of forged writing is submitted to you?"
 q must have also some of the genuine writing of the person whose name has been forged, and, if possible, some too of the person who is suspected of having committed the crime"
 And then?"
 And then comes a microscopic con- parison of all three. The first step is to determine whether or not you under stand - everybody understands - that handwriting is peculiar and distinctive But no one but those who have dug in handwriting all their lives know how very peculiar and distinctive it is. The oak and the hickory have different leaves, but those leaves are not more different than Smiths Bs and Jones' Bs, and sup posing fraudulent oak wished to pro- duce leaf which would be mistaken for hickory leaf it might possibly throw off an imitation whose shape would be all right, but whose veins would be all wrong-that is what we judge by; it is the inner motive. One man may write your name so that it will eceive bank cashier or probate court, but he cannot do it so that it will deceive me-"
 And how do you judge?"
 "Well, let me illustrate. Here is a sheet of paper written by copying clerk; you see the same machine made letters over and over again. To your eye there is nothing individual about it at all, for the reason that you go hunting for those little marks and hourishes with which people seek to individualize their writing-that process would be much like trying to recognize a beauty of the regency by the position of her patches An expert goes first for the capital letters, which were first learned and which con tain most of the unconscious individual ity of the writer. Notice these Ms, each of them shaped in the center impercept- iblv, and ending in a slovenly turn, now up, now down, getting more and more slovenly as the pages go on and the hand tires. See here; he has changed the po- sition of his pen from between the in- dex and thumb to the next two fingers, and the writing, to your eye, is that of another person. But follow those Ms: don't YOU see thev are all the same?"
 "Do you believe that character can be read from handwriting"
 "Most assuredly do-every one does If you will take letter from friend and examine it closely you will see the characteristics ofhis mind reflected again in the characteristics of his letter. fine is a wild, careless sort of fellow, there will be wild helter-skelter gallop of the pen over the paper; if he is methodical accurate and precise there it will be again. I saw very curious illustration of this some years ago when l was travel ing in Ireland. I stopped at Kildare castle and while there was shown letters written by about eight generations of the Fitzgeralds. To an expert the her edity shown in the notes was startling Of course they were diverse, but there was an under similarity among them all as we'll marked and recognizable as the Hapsburg nose. From the villainous scratching done by Silken Thomas, down to the civilized steel penmanship of the present earl, the hands were various but alike"
 How do you account for the different styles of penmanship in vogue among different nations?"
 "That is point was coming to. You can tell German by his handwriting as readily as by his tongue, or French man either. Spain and Portugal write as rule one hand, while Italy writes alto gether another, and Greece still third There are race distictions, just as the Fitzgerald hand is family distinction Writing divides itself into great groups before it is separable into small ones and into individual units. Take the stiff angular but little originality and you see the product of a system. Compare it with the utterly untrammeled hand of America, and we are forming a national hand, and yeu will see the enormous difference. There is no prettier writing than the cramped but symmetrical hand of the nuns in the French convents. Here, again, after cause look for effect. There IS more in the scriveners' art, young gentleman. than is dreamed of in vour nhiloGonhVp