The Merced Sun-Star, 24 February 1922
NEW YORK, Feb. 18. — Back yonder, when a famous scientist dumbfounded the world with his belief that man was descended from the monkey, there were those—and many there are now—who couldn’t see it that way. It may be interesting, then, to tell about Gabong’s finger prints. Gabong is an orang-utan, present habitat the Zoological Park in the Bronx. Now, Gabong hasn’t done anything criminal, but just the same his finger prints are on file in police headquarters. Furthermore, those police experts who have been on the finger printing job for years can’t tell at a glance the difference between the prints of Gabong and his alleged human brethren. Raymond Ditmars, curator of mammals and reptiles at the zoo, was anxious to get a real imprint of one of the orang-utan’s fingers. After trying successfully [I think they meant to write "unsuccessfully"] with vaseline and graphite, he called at headquarters, explaining the finger printing of monkeys wasn’t as easy as handling pickpockets and such. Monkeys squirmed too much. Sergeant William H. Hamersley, of the identification bureau thought the prisoners did a little squirming of their own and then explained how disobliging prisoners are caught off their guard. It isn’t necessary to ink their fingers. They touch a sheet of paper unthinkingly, which is then dusted with a powder that brings out the lines in complete detail. Mr. Ditmars returned to the zoo and tried it out on Gabong. The orang’s hands are as large as those of a man, and his thumb is similarly shaped. When the curator went again to headquarters with a print of Gabong’s thumb and one of his own and asked Sergeant Hamersley which of the two was the human print the expert couldn’t say. The sergeant referred the two prints to fourteen other experts in the identification bureau, none of them could say “this is Gabong,” or “this is Mr. Ditmars.” The police experts produced from the files a score of thumb prints with practically the same arrangement of whorls and ellipses that Gabong's thumb showed. A magnifying glass was necessary to find the difference in them.
