The New Sciences of Detection (http://chnm.gmu.edu/courses/magic/police/policework.html)
By the 1880s, urban police forces began developing new techniques for keeping track of criminals, especially new techniques of record-keeping. Most of these techniques were heavily influenced by criminology, a field of study which sought to discover the relationship between what people looked like and their character.
This is the frontispiece of Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso's Criminal Man, published in 1887 and reprinted in Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man. Lombroso searched for a relation between appearance and character
Lombroso claimed that to the trained eye, the eye of the detective, these people would clearly be organized into categories. Those in group "A" are all shoplifters, "B" are swindlers, "H" are purse snatchers, "E" are murderers, etc. A crowd of strangers is rendered into categories. And supposedly you can see a man's real character at a glance.
Lombroso often lamented the fact that his fellow Europeans were skeptical about his work. But he took comfort from the fact that Americans loved it. His work was far more influential in the United States than anywhere else.
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