Anthropometry, however, gradually fell into disfavour, and it has been generally supplanted by the superior system of finger prints (q.v.). Bertillonage exhibited certain defects which were first brought to light in Bengal. The objections raised were (1) the costliness of the instruments employed and their liability to get out of order; (2) the need for specially instructed measurers, men of superior education; (3) the errors that frequently crept in when carrying out the processes and were all but irremediable. Measures inaccurately taken, or wrongly read off, could seldom, if ever, be corrected, and these persistent errors defeated all chance of successful search. The process was slow, as it was necessary to repeat it three times so as to arrive at a mean result. In Bengal measurements were already abandoned by 1897, when the finger print system was adopted throughout British India. Three years later England followed suit; and as the result of a fresh inquiry ordered by the Home Office, finger prints were alone relied upon for identification.
AUTHORITIES.--Lombroso, _Antropometria di 400 delinquenti_ (1872); Roberts, _Manual of Anthropometry_ (1878); Ferri, _Studi comparati di antropometria_ (2 vols., 1881-1882); Lombroso, _Rughe anomale speciali ai criminali_ (1890); Bertillon, _Instructions signalétiques pour l'identification anthropométrique_ (1893); Livi, _Anthropometria_ (Milan, 1900); Fürst, _Indextabellen zum anthropometrischen Gebrauch_ (Jena, 1902); _Report of Home Office Committee on the Best Means of Identifying Habitual Criminals_ (1893-1894). (A. G.)
ANTHROPOMORPHISM (Gr. [Greek: anthropos], man, [Greek: morphae], form), the attribution (a) of a human body, or (b) of human qualities generally, to God or the gods. The word anthropomorphism is a modern coinage (possibly from 18th century French). The _New English Dictionary_ is misled by the 1866 reprint of Paul Bayne on Ephesians when it quotes "anthropomorphist" as 17th century English. Seventeenth century editions print "anthropomorphits," i.e. anthropomorphites, in sense (a). The older abstract term is "anthropopathy," literally "attributing human feelings," in sense (b).
Early religion, among its many objects of worship, includes beasts (see ANIMAL-WORSHIP), considered, in the more refined theology of the later Greeks and Romans, as metamorphoses of the great gods. Similarly we find "therianthropic" forms--half animal, half human--in Egypt or Assyria-Babylonia. In contrast with these, it is considered one of the glories of the Olympian mythology of Greece that it believed in happy manlike beings (though exempt from death, and using special rarefied foods, &c.), and celebrated them in statues of the most exquisite art. Israel shows us animal images, doubtless of a ruder sort, when Yahweh is worshipped in the northern kingdom under the image of a steer. (Some scholars think the title "mighty one of Jacob," Psalm cxxxii., 2, 5, _et al_., [Hebrew: abir] as if from [Hebrew: avir] is really "steer" [Hebrew: abir] "of Jacob.") But the higher religion of Israel inclined to morality more than to art, and forbade image worship altogether. This prepared the way for the conception of God as an immaterial Spirit. True mythical anthropomorphisms occur in early parts of the Old Testament (e.g. Genesis iii. 8, cf. vi. 2), though in the majority of Old Testament passages such expressions are merely verbal (e.g. Isaiah lix. 1). In the Christian Church (and again in early Mahommedanism) simple minds believed in the corporeal nature of God. Gibbon and other writers quote from John Cassian the tale of the poor monk, who, being convinced of his error, burst into tears, exclaiming, "You have taken away my God! I have none now whom I can worship!" According to a fragment of Origen (on Genesis i. 26), Melito of Sardis shared this belief. Many have thought Melito's work, [Greek: peri ensomatou theou], must have been a treatise on the Incarnation; but it is hard to think that Origen could blunder so. Epiphanius tells of Audaeus of Mesopotamia and his followers, Puritan sectaries in the 4th century, who were orthodox except for this belief and for Quartodecimanism (see EASTER). Tertullian, who is sometimes called an anthropomorphist, stood for the Stoical doctrine, that all reality, even the divine, is in a sense material.