Evening star., 1952-12-01
FBI Helps to Identify
Cows by Nose Prints
Fingerprinters Work Out
Plan With Doiry Experts
By Thomos R. Henry

AS fingerprints are to men. nose
prints are to cows.
With help Of Federal Bureau Of In
veStigation f1ngerprint experts. three
dairy scientists of the South Dakota
Agricultural Experiment Station at
Brookings. S. Dak.. have worked out
a system of nose prints by means of
which it is possible to identify one in
dividual cow from million others.
The chance of duplication of nose prints
is not much greater than that Of
duplication Of flngerprints.
Morris Hirsch, Edmund F. Graham
and Arthur E. Dracy of the South
Dakota station have classified the nose
prints into 5.832 groups. Any COW can
Immediately be assigned to one of these
groups. These groups represent the
possible combinations of about IS
characters.
Contour of Noses.
The ridges on q cows nose generally
are in the form Of arches. There are
arches with 90-degree angles and an
giles of more or less than 80 degrees.
Most noses fall in one or another of
these classes but some combine two or
more. Occasionally the ridges do not
form arches at all.
Sometimes the ridges are continuous,
sometimes broken. Sometimes the lines
constituting them are straight, some
times crooked. Sometimes they are
composed of dots. There may be COM
binations Of any of these characters
such as inverted arches and broken
ridges extending in straight line.
Once the group is established, the
rest of the indentification depends on
study with a magnifying glass Of in
dividual characteristics of a nose print.
The whole is reduced to formula
which farmer can have prepared for
each animal in his herd, reading some
thing like this: Jersey, 80 degree in
verted arch, u, u, 70. The figures
refer to the combinations of the ARCH
line patterns such as continuous, crooked.
lines, dots etc.
Taking Of these nose prints is relatively
simple. the dairy scientists say. They
just swab cows nose with ink and
roll piece Of blotting paper over it.
They have made nose prints Of all the
South Dakota State College herd and
the herds Of most Of the neighboring
farmers.
The nose prints, they have found. do
not change, so far as basic pattern Is
concerned, during cows life.
C. o. Vickmark and L. Miller, finger
print experts of the FBI Office at Pierre.
South Dakota, assisted in establishing
this system of identifying cows on the
same principles the criminal inveSti-
eating agency uses to identify men.
Cigarettes Tested on Mice.
One cigarette an hour definitely In
creases the lung cancer rate among
mice, markedly slows down growth and
apparently makes them sterile.
This has been reported to the Ameri-
can Association for the Advancement Of
Science here by DR.. j. M. Essenberg OF
the Chicago Medical School.
DR.. Essenberg devised a smoking
machine which automatically smoked
q cigarette an hour and filled with the
smoke a glass chamber In which the
experimental mice were enclosed. They
had to inhale cigarette smoke. willy
nilly. ~
About 80 per cent more lung tumors
occurred in the cigarette-exposed mice
than among the control group who were
not exposed. This is not entirely con-
elusive. the experimenter says, but the
difference seems statistically significant.
A generation or so ago. when cigarette
smoking was regarded as positively i'm
moral by the pipe 'and cigar-smoking
older generation, boys used to be warned
that the practice would stunt their
growth It certainly did stunt the
growth of the Chicago experimenters
rats. This may have been, he points
out, because it lowered their appetites.
Equal numbers of male and female
mice were used. Perhaps the most sur
prising result of the experiment was
that none of those exposed to the ciga-
rette smoke produced any young while
the control animals were normally
prolific.