The handwriting of the schoolboy and schoolgirl, though crude, is conventional and idealized.  It has but few characteristics so long as the school model or copy-book hand is the goal.  The pupil gives constant attention to the handwriting as well as to the thought.  A number of students of about the same grade, under the same teacher, will write much alike.  Fifteen or twenty of these students could each write a line on a page and it might baffle a layman, and perhaps puzzle an expert, to tell whether or not more than one person wrote the page.  This constant striving after one ideal, and putting thought on the handwriting, had drawn them all toward that ideal and away from individuality.

The employment of professional handwriting experts as witnesses in court cases that often involve enormous sums of money, or the liberty or even the lives of suspected malefactors, has awakened widespread interest in the methods of this class of experts, their resources and capabilities in conserving the ends of justice.

Many uninformed people appear to look on the handwriting expert as one who, by intuition or the possession of some mysterious occult power, is enabled to distinguish at a glance the true and the spurious in any questioned handwriting.  Nothing could be further from the fact.

The secret of his power—­as in any other line of scientific research—­lies wholly in his intimate familiarity with the innumerable physical details which comprise the written line or word or letter—­sometimes so slight a matter as the dotting of an i or the placing of a comma.  It is precisely the same specialized sense, born of acute observation and minute scrutiny that enables an expert chemist to take two powders of like weight and color, identical in appearance to the common eye and perhaps in taste to the common palate, and say:  This drug is harmless, wholesome; that is a deadly poison—­and to specify not only their various individual constituents but the exact proportion of each.  The trained eye of the handwriting expert (as in another case could that of the expert chemist) can often detect at a glance certain distinguishing earmarks of submitted writing that enable him to fix the identity of the writer almost off-hand.  In the the great majority of cases, however, the cunning of the forger calls for deliberate, painstaking study and investigation before the conscientious expert is willing to announce with absolute surety an opinion so often fraught with tremendous possibilities for good or for evil.

Nothing else that a person does is so characteristic as the handwriting, and the identification of the individual can be established by it better than by portraits or almost any other means.  As lawyers and laymen and courts are finding this out, the handwriting expert is more and more called upon to untangle snarled questions and to right wrongs.