roughly to the map of an archipelago
*
Plate IXa
Photomicrograph of pencil line made by Professor Lightner Witmer.
Magnified 120 diameters.
(cropped from page, border reconstructed)
ex Persifor Frazer (1844-1909). Bibliotics, or the study of documents : determination of the individual character of handwriting and detection of fraud and forgery; new methods of research. Third edition, greatly enlarged, re-arranged and in part re-written.
Philadelphia 1901
University of Michigan copy, digitized April 14, 2007
—
“Here the record of vertical pressure is necessarily absent, since there are no spreading nibs to admit a larger flow of fluid. But the lateral deviations are very pronounced, and — what might not have been expected — in almost every case the position of the pencil may be determined by a more or less continuous line forming one margin of the stroke while the other is a fringe of detached dots and marks comparable roughly to the map of an archipelago and the main coast. These detached spots are evidently the minute bosses and corrugations of the fibrous surface of the paper which have been touched and soiled by the solid point of the writing instrument.”
p 106
Persifor Frazer — geologist, mineralogist, metallurgist, handwriting expert, (celebrity?) agnostic.
papers (and brief biography) at the American Philosophical Society, Persifor Frazer papers, 1882-1906 Mss.B.F867
tags:
archipelago; archipelagics; lines
Percifor Frazer, Bibliotics (1901)