Question

In the final decades of the nineteenth century, the burgeoning urban populations of Western Europe precipitated a crisis in criminal jurisprudence: the inability to reliably identify recidivists. The initial solution, spearheaded by French police clerk Alphonse Bertillon in 1879, was anthropometry, or "Bertillonage." This system was predicated on the biological premise that the human adult skeleton remains strictly immutable after the age of twenty, and that the probability of two individuals sharing an identical combination of eleven specific bone measurements was infinitesimally small. Bertillonage swiftly achieved hegemony across European and American law enforcement agencies, celebrated for injecting the rigorous, quantifiable objectivity of the physical sciences into a criminal justice system previously reliant on the fallible, subjective vagaries of eyewitness testimony and rudimentary photography.

However, the eventual obsolescence of anthropometry was catalyzed not by a failure of its underlying biological theory, but by an acute bureaucratic vulnerability that manifested only as criminal databases achieved unprecedented scale. To render the massive influx of data navigable, Bertillon had devised a sophisticated archival taxonomy. Records were recursively subdivided based on categorizations of "small," "medium," and "large" for each successive measurement. Initially, this allowed clerks to isolate a suspect’s file from thousands of records within minutes. Yet, as the Parisian registry swelled past 100,000 distinct entries by the late 1890s, a critical threshold was breached. The sheer volume of records meant that individual terminal subdivisions—the final filing categories—became too densely populated. Compounding this was the inherent variance in human measurement; a clerk's slight miscalibration of the calipers could categorize a "medium" foot as "large," necessitating exhaustive, multi-category searches that fundamentally undermined the system's utility given the strict temporal constraints of pretrial detention.

The subsequent institutional embrace of dactyloscopy—fingerprinting—is frequently, yet erroneously, characterized by modern legal historians as a sudden paradigm shift driven exclusively by the recognition of the superior biological uniqueness of friction ridge skin. In reality, the transitional period was protracted, and the ascendance of dactyloscopy was secured primarily by its administrative, rather than purely epistemic, advantages. The breakthrough was not the fingerprint itself, which had been utilized for identification in colonial India for decades, but rather the development of the Galton-Henry classification system. This taxonomy translated the complex physiological minutiae of arches, loops, and whorls into a concise alphanumeric formula. Unlike Bertillon’s inherently limited categorical subdivisions, the Galton-Henry system facilitated an infinitely expandable, strictly linear filing architecture. Consequently, police administrators championed dactyloscopy because it decisively resolved the clerical bottleneck that had paralyzed anthropometry, even as conservative jurists concurrently expressed profound skepticism regarding the courtroom admissibility of latent prints, demanding physical demonstration of matches that proved far more rhetorically challenging to present to a jury than the intuitively graspable dimensions of a skull or forearm.

According to the passage, "conservative jurists" initially harbored profound skepticism regarding dactyloscopy explicitly because of which of the following reasons?