Whether science helped the detection of crime more than it promoted the criminal’s end was the subject of an interesting discussion before a large gathering of experts connected with the investigation of crime at a meeting of the Society of Arts in mail week. Mr. Ainsworth Mitchell, who opened the discussion with reading a paper, showed how the development of science and its many branches had narrowed down the criminal’s chances of escape, since the early days of last century, when anyone who committed a secret crime had an even chance of evading capture. Mistakes of identity, he suggested, had been a more fruitful source of miscarriages of justice than all other causes put together. The world contained some 4,00,000,000 of people, and notwithstanding the infinite variety of human features, there was hardly anybody alive today who could not be mistaken for somebody else. Mr. Mitchell then dealt with the finger print and poison test methods and pleaded for co-ordination among scientific workers.
