By careful and frequent practice he may succeed well enough to deceive the ordinary man, but is rarely successful in baffling the expert.  Even the most skilful culprit cannot wholly hide his individuality, as he is sure to relapse into his ordinary method occasionally.  Then again, great care has to be used, and this can be detected by the traces of hesitancy, the substitution of curves for angles and vice versa, which come out very plainly when the writing is examined under the microscope, as it usually is by the expert.

A plan of detection which has been adopted with great success is to cut out each letter in a doubtful piece of writing, and paste all the A’s, B’s, etc., on separate sheets of paper.  The process is also gone through with a genuine bit of caligraphy of the imitator or the imitated, as the case may be.  Comparison almost invariably shows that the letters are less uniform if imitation has been attempted, the writer being occasionally betrayed into some approach to his ordinary caligraphy, or into momentary forgetfulness of some special point in the handwriting he is simulating.

No point is too small to escape an expert’s attention.  The dotting of the “i’s,” the crossing of “t’s,” the curls and flourishes, the intervals between the words, the thinness of the up-stroke and the thickness of the down-stroke, are all noted and carefully compared.  Where only a signature has been forged, and that by means of tracings from the original the resemblance is often so exact as to deceive even the supposed author, but in these cases the microscope is generally effective in determining not merely the forgery but the method by which it was accomplished.  It is some comfort to know that the cunning of the forger is overmatched by the scientific skill of the trained expert.

CHAPTER XXIV

HOW FORGERS ALTER BANK NOTES

Bankers Easily Deceived—­How Ten One Hundred-Dollar Bills Are Made out of Nine—­How to Detect Altered Bank Notes—­Making a Ten-Dollar Bill out of a Five—­A Ten Raised to Fifty—­How Two-Dollar Bills are Raised to a Higher Denomination—­Bogus Money in Commercial Colleges—­Action of the United States Treasury Department—­Engraving a Greenback—­How They Are Printed—­Making a Vignette—­Beyond the Reach of Rascals—­How Bank Notes Are Printed, Signed and Issued by the Government—­Safeguards to Foil Forgers, Counterfeiters and Alterers of Bank Notes—­Devices to Raise Genuine Bank Notes—­Split Notes—­Altering Silver Certificates.

A dangerous game and one too often successfully perpetrated, is the raising of bank bills from a lower to a higher denomination.  Counterfeiters and forgers have often been detected making ten bills of nine by the following operation: 

A counterfeit one hundred-dollar bank note is cut into ten pieces; one of these pieces is pasted into a genuine bill, cutting out a piece of the genuine of the same size.  In pasting nine genuine bills in this manner nine pieces are obtained, which, with one piece of counterfeit, will make a tenth bill, which is the profit.  This operation is not a very successful one, as the difference between the counterfeit and the genuine will be very evident to any one who examines closely.