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                            CESARE LOMBROSO
                        A MODERN MAN OF SCIENCE


                                   BY

                           HANS KURELLA, M.D.

           AUTHOR OF “NATURAL HISTORY OF THE CRIMINAL,” ETC.


                     TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN BY

                           M. EDEN PAUL, M.D.

[Illustration]

                                NEW YORK

                             REBMAN COMPANY

                             1123 BROADWAY




                         _All rights reserved_

------------------------------------------------------------------------




                                PREFACE


The subject of this little book is, as its title shows, Cesare Lombroso,
the man and the investigator; it makes no attempt to deal adequately
with Lombroso, the reformer of criminology and criminal sociology. To do
justice to Lombroso’s work in the latter respect would be impossible,
without at the same time writing the history of the Italian school of
“positive criminal jurisprudence” and that of the influence of that
school upon important tendencies of the public life of all the leading
civilized peoples. It would also be impossible without dealing at the
same time with the plan of the new German criminal code. For many
reasons I have refrained from any such attempt; above all, in view of
limits of space. None the less, I have dealt with Lombroso’s activity as
a reformer as far as this was essential in order to do justice to the
personality of the deceased investigator.

Certain brief sections of this book have, with considerable
modifications, been taken over from my earlier publications upon the
development of criminal anthropology. Entirely new, however, is the
attempt here made to demonstrate how high is the position Lombroso may
justly be said to have occupied in a brilliant epoch of positive study
of the world, of mankind, and of society. In order to illustrate the
positive mode of thought, I have in an Appendix, to which I especially
direct the reader’s attention, attempted a tabular statement of the
facts and documents of positivism during the middle decades of the
nineteenth century. The inclusion in this tabular statement of the
principal writings of Herbert Spencer is the result of mature
consideration and of a renewed careful study of his essay entitled
“Reasons for Dissenting from the Philosophy of M. Comte.” Comte’s
philosophy represents merely the reflection of positivism about itself,
and is no more than the introduction to the completer development of
positivism.

                                                           HANS KURELLA.

 BONN, _Whitsuntide, 1910_.




                    PREFATORY NOTE BY THE TRANSLATOR


I take this opportunity of expressing my grateful acknowledgments to Mr.
Havelock Ellis, who read my translation in manuscript, and made many
valuable suggestions as to terminology.

                                                           M. EDEN PAUL.

 MOORCROFT, PARKSTONE, DORSET.
         _Christmas, 1910._




                                CONTENTS


 CHAPTER                                                            PAGE
         PREFACE                                                       v

      I. ANTECEDENTS—LOMBROSO’S PREDECESSORS IN RESEARCH               1

     II. CRIMINAL ANTHROPOLOGY                                        18

    III. OPPOSITION TO LOMBROSO’S VIEWS—WOMAN AS CRIMINAL—THE
           POLITICAL CRIMINAL—CRIMINAL PSYCHOLOGY                     55

     IV. GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS REGARDING LOMBROSO’S LIFE-WORK AS A
           SOCIAL REFORMER, HIS METHODS, AND HIS PHILOSOPHY          106

      V. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF CRIMINAL ANTHROPOLOGY                   130

     VI. CRIMINAL JURISPRUDENCE—PELLAGRA—AGRARIAN REFORM             139

    VII. ENVIRONMENT AND THE THEORIES AS TO THE NATURE OF
           GENIUS—LOMBROSO’S GENIUS AND PERSONALITY                  158

         APPENDIX A. LOMBROSO’S SPIRITUALISTIC RESEARCHES            167

         APPENDIX B. LIST OF BOOKS CONSULTED                         177

         APPENDIX C. FACTS AND DOCUMENTS OF POSITIVISM               178

         INDEX                                                       182




                            CESARE LOMBROSO




                               CHAPTER I
            ANTECEDENTS—LOMBROSO’S PREDECESSORS IN RESEARCH


Cesare Lombroso was born in Verona, as an Austrian subject, on November
6, 1835, and was the second child in a family of five. His father Aron
sprang from a Venetian mercantile family, whose origin can be traced
back to a colony of North African Jews, trading with Leghorn, Genoa, and
Venice. Again and again members of the Lombroso family settled in one or
other of these ports. The branch to which he himself belonged had lived
for several centuries in Venice and the Venetian territories on the
mainland, of which from the year 1448 onwards Verona formed a part; they
were patrician merchants, to whom the French occupation, occurring
before Lombroso’s father grew up, had brought full and equal privileges
of citizenship.[1] Several members of this Venetian family were
distinguished by characteristic and vigorous action on behalf of the
cause of enlightenment. In Virginia, North America, in the seventeenth
century, the brother of a direct ancestor of Cesare Lombroso, at a great
risk to himself of being burned alive, protested most energetically
against the belief in witchcraft, and declared that the reputed witches
were “hysterical” merely.

The French emancipation of Upper Italy was followed in 1814 by the
Austrian reaction, but the family suffered at this time from the decline
in economic prosperity (interrupted for a while in 1830, when Venice
became a free port) upon which its own well-being and patrician position
had been dependent.

The formation of the Hapsburg Kingdom of Lombardy and Venice put an end
for the time being to equality of civil rights for the Jews; and Verona
was one of the few towns of the district in which Jewish boys were
allowed to attend the Gymnasium (public school), now removed from the
control of the freethinkers, and handed over to that of the Jesuits.

When Lombroso’s mother, Zefira Levi, married Aron Lombroso in the year
1830, she stipulated that her children must be brought up in a place in
which it would be possible for them to attend the higher schools.

The marriage with Zefira Levi, who belonged to a rich family engaged in
the higher branch of industrial life, did not suffice to prevent the
onset of poverty; and the youth of the five children of the marriage was
passed in narrow circumstances. The mother, richly endowed both in mind
and in character, and deeply concerned regarding the upbringing and
culture of her children, remained her son’s confidant. She nourished in
him the love of freedom and the sense of independence, both of which
were dominant in her parental home at Chieri, one of the centres of
activity of the Carbonari. Chieri, an industrial town of Piedmont, lay
beyond the sphere of influence of Haynau and Radetzky, who, with the aid
of their Croats and Tschechs, encouraged the feudal and clerical
reaction in Venice, Verona, and Milan.

Lombroso’s father was an amateur as regards practical life, a man who
had grown up under the influence of the French spirit and in a perfectly
free social state, a man of great goodness of heart, but as little
fitted to cope with the influences of the economic decay of the Venetian
State as he was with those of the Austrian reign of terror.

During Lombroso’s childhood there occurred a conspiracy on the part of
certain Veronese patriots against the Austrian occupation, which was
suppressed by the wholesale hanging and shooting of the conspirators;
and when he was only thirteen years of age there took place the
temporary freeing of Milan and Venice from the Austrian yoke (1848), an
event in which the young men of Milan, the second largest town of the
old Venetian Republic, played a lively part.

Lombroso’s revolutionary tendencies in the field of science, and his
small respect for what was traditionally established, were doubtless
dependent upon the joint effect of the inherited tendencies and the
youthful impressions I have described. An important additional factor in
his development was his family’s loss of fortune, consequent upon the
political disturbances in Italy, which lasted until the re-establishment
of the Austrian dominion. It was only the courage and capacity of the
mother which saved the children from sinking into the ranks of the
proletariat; but some loss of social position was inevitable, and the
effect of this on Lombroso’s distinctive temperament may be traced in
the fact that he was a rebel from youth onwards, and strongly opposed
the (vitalistic) doctrines professed at the Universities by the sons of
the well-to-do. Thus it was also that he ventured a serious attack upon
the interests of the great landed proprietors of Upper Italy by his
descriptions of agrarian poverty and his bold exposition of the causes
of pellagra.

The influence of the philosopher Vico, whose works were eagerly studied
in secret at the Gymnasium (public school) of Verona, made him
acquainted at an early date with the importance of the principle of
organic development in relation to the structure and life of human
society. Vico was studied _in secret_, because the Gymnasium was under
the control of Jesuits with Austrian sympathies, who deliberately
discouraged all advanced ideas. In 1861 Lombroso wrote in his diary as
follows: “It may be said of my schooldays without exaggeration that I
was thrust back into an environment of persistent medievalism—not the
later sentimental revival of the Middle Ages in romance and drama—but
into the conditions that prevailed prior to 1789, literally restored by
the might of the bayonets of 1814. The memory of this forcible
discipline, which did violence to the inborn logical spirit, and visited
with severe punishment any protests against its methods, is so hateful
to me that even now it visits me in dreams like a nightmare.” At the
time of the introduction of Italian scholastic methods into the lands
under Austrian rule, the well-known utterance of the Kaiser Franz is
said to have originated: “I want, not educated, but obedient subjects.”

While still at school, Lombroso was also introduced to the evolutionary
idea by the writings and the powerful personal influence of the
physician Marzolo, who endeavoured by means of comparative philology to
explain the origin of the earliest religious and legal institutions.
Ceccarel, Marzolo’s biographer, in his first work on this investigator,
published in 1870 (by Priuli of Treviso), writes as follows: “In 1850,
when the first volume of Marzolo’s ‘Monumenti storici rivelati dall’
analisi della parola’ was published, certain periodicals reviewed the
book in the most favourable terms. But the writer himself was
disappointed by their remarks, for he saw that his well-meaning critics
had not really understood his ideas. Then one day he read in a journal
published in Verona an article in which full justice was done to his
book; he desired to make the acquaintance of this critic, whose name was
unknown to him, and whose real understanding of Marzolo’s views had
delighted the latter for the first time in several years, and had at
length rewarded him for his long and arduous labours. He imagined that
the writer of the notice must be an advanced but lonely scientific
thinker, one who owing to his private circumstances or on account of the
disturbed times had hitherto lived in retirement. But when the writer of
the review came to see Marzolo at Treviso, it proved to be a youth only
sixteen years of age—Cesare Lombroso—the first in all Italy to recognize
the genius of Marzolo, bringing the love of a son and the devotion of a
disciple.”

At the outset of Lombroso’s studies he was greatly influenced by reading
Burdach’s “Handbuch der Physiologie,” a work rich in anthropological
ideas. At the University of Pavia, Panizza[2] was the only man who had
much effect in shaping Lombroso’s mental development.

During the decade 1850 to 1860, on the other hand, Lombroso, as a
self-taught man, was simultaneously influenced by three great
contemporary and complementary tendencies—that of French positivism,
that of German materialism, and that of English evolutionism. With the
last-named he became acquainted through French intermediation. He never
had any clinical instruction in psychiatry. He read the works of
Charuigi, Griesinger, and the great psychiatrists of the school of
Esquirol.

Lombroso’s attitude towards German materialism, by which in youth he was
so powerfully influenced, is shown most clearly by two utterances of his
regarding Moleschott. The first of these occurs in the preface to his
Italian edition of Moleschott’s “Kreislauf des Lebens,” a translation
not published till 1869, though written in the early sixties. (In the
year 1854 Moleschott was expelled from Heidelberg on account of the
publication of this work; from 1861 to 1879 he was professor of
physiology in Turin.) The passage runs as follows (II.-III.): “At a late
hour, perhaps, and yet when the time was ripe, and unquestionably with
greater sincerity and fervour than has been the case with the other
Latin peoples, Italy took part in the scientific movement of which this
book formed the starting-point. But just because she was so tardy an
adherent, and in the endeavour, as it were, to make up for lost time,
some persons in this country are apt to go too far; not only do they
contest the old prejudices and the false authorities, but they also deny
or misunderstand facts, simply for the reason that those in the other
camp admit these facts, or because these facts appear to support the old
doctrines. Thus they often follow leaders who are not entirely to be
trusted, such as Büchner, Renan, and Reich; and they mistake
declamations and confused rhapsodies for sound arguments, oppose
fanaticism with fanaticism, and offer to their enemies the tools needed
for the reconstruction of the buildings which have just been razed to
the ground.”

The other passage occurs in his obituary notice on Moleschott, written
in 1893: “The whole course of modern science shows that the impulse it
received from the life-work of Moleschott is destined, not only to
persist, but to make further and more rapid progress. Moreover, the
reputed philanthropists, whose objection was not so much to the truth
itself as to the injurious consequences which they believed would follow
from its publication, must see to-day that certain truths, however
dangerous and alarming they may at first appear, lead ultimately to the
general advantage, and to the advantage even of that morality on which
it was at first supposed they would have a damaging effect. It no longer
distresses us when we see that morality, thanks to social physics and
political economy, must descend from its glittering but fragile
metaphysical altar, in order to find in utility a modest but secure
foundation, from which it becomes possible to render harmless or to
diminish that crime which hitherto has mocked at penal methods.”

In Vienna, in 1856, Lombroso passed the official examination for his
medical degree. Here the influence of Skoda, and Lombroso’s becoming
acquainted with the early works of Virchow, did not tend to induce in
him sentiments of toleration towards the vitalistic doctrines dominant
at the Italian Universities or towards the narrow circle of professors
owing their appointment to Austrian influence and interested in the
maintenance of these doctrines. He never ceased to be affected by this
early opposition to academic tradition and to academic circles; in fact,
it accentuated in him a certain natural tendency to paradoxes and
heresies.

The inclination to exact observation,[3] acquired through his contact
with German science, led him to the study, with record of weights and
measurements, of cretinism in Upper Italy;[4] from this to the
utilization of these methods for the instigation of an anthropometrical
investigation of the population of Upper Italy; and also to the study of
clinical psychiatry, at that time entirely neglected in Italy.[5] The
translation of Moleschott’s epoch-making writings gave a finish to
Lombroso’s conception of the world; he broke loose from the speculative
tendency of the psychiatry of the day, which at that time in Germany
also was assuming the most remarkable forms; he turned with repugnance
from the interminable discussions regarding the freedom of the will, and
began, in the case of the insane, of criminal lunatics, and of
criminals, to study their pathological anatomy (assisted here by Golgi),
their sensory impressions, and their anthropological—and more especially
craniological—peculiarities.

It is a well-known fact that from that day to our own the pathological
anatomy of the psychoses has not furnished much in the way of positive
results, not even to the most accomplished virtuosos of the methods of
staining the fibres of the brain. Lombroso, to whom in Pavia Golgi for a
long time acted as assistant, wisely refused to limit himself to the
study of pathological anatomy, but always investigated side by side with
this the clinical features of the psychoses and neuroses.

From the first he inclined to the view that the exact measurement and
description of skulls and brains would lead to the discovery of definite
distinctions between sane and insane criminals, between lunatics and
epileptics, etc.

Whilst he never ignored clinical observation and the study of the
sensory functions, he gave the first place to weights and measurements:
these were to him the guarantees of an exact method of procedure; and he
was led to borrow the instruments and methods of anthropology on account
of his postulate for an anthropology of lunatics and criminals. In his
interpretation of the facts thus obtained he was guided chiefly by the
sane materialism of Moleschott and by the Darwinian idea of the
variability of races. As a disciple of Vico, he saw nothing absurd in
the view that an apparently purely social phenomenon, such as crime, can
be organically caused.

The chance discovery of theromorphism (the expression is Virchow’s, and
denotes the presence in man of certain bodily peculiarities of one of
the lower animals) in the skulls of certain criminals, in the year 1870,
finally gave rise to the formulation of a uniform hypothesis regarding
the nature of criminality. Before the publication, in 1871, of the
elements of this theory, Lombroso was able to devote a year to the study
of the inmates of a large prison, being at the time Medical
Superintendent of the Provincial Asylum at Pesaro, where there was also
a large penitentiary. During the years 1871 to 1876, when he was once
more lecturer and professor-extraordinary at Pavia[6]—years during which
he published his studies on pellagra, and, in addition, a number of
anthropological and purely psychiatric works—he was also much occupied
with the anatomical post-mortem study of the bodies of criminals. After
1876, when he came to Turin[7] as professor of forensic medicine, being
also physician to the great prison in that town for prisoners awaiting
trial, he was able to examine most minutely, according to his own
methods, two hundred prisoners every year, whilst a much greater number
were subjected at least to ordinary clinical examination. This
inconsiderable and very poorly-paid official position led him, without
abandoning his unwearied researches into pellagra, to devote his chief
attention day by day to the subject of criminal anthropology.

It was in the course of these investigations, and of the controversies
to which the publication of his results gave rise, that he first became
acquainted with the work of his predecessors in the same field. This has
been demonstrated to me by incontrovertible evidence.

As predecessors must be named some of the adherents of Gall’s theories
regarding the skull: the French physiologist and physician, Despine; the
French psychiatrist, Morel; and three English medical men—one, the
psychiatrist and distinguished anthropologist, Prichard, the other two
prison surgeons, Nicolson and Bruce Thomson.

Gall is apt to be judged, very unjustly, only by his errors; for he was,
in truth, the originator of the principle of the localization of the
functions of the brain, and gave the first impulse to the scientific
study of criminals, though he did not himself make any definite
discoveries in this field. His pupil, Lauvergne, prison surgeon at
Toulon during a long period of years, examined thousands of criminals,
and left interesting plaster-casts of skulls; certain types were
admirably described by him. Despine made a thorough study of the
psychology of the criminal, and showed that the principal
characteristics of the habitual criminal are idleness, irresolution, and
lessened sensibility, both mental and physical. Supplementary to
Despine’s investigations was the great work of Lucas upon heredity, in
which he demonstrated the hereditary transmissibility of the disposition
to theft, murder, rape, and arson, and furnished extensive materials
regarding the congenital nature of the tendency to crime.

Morel’s work lacked thorough analysis, and was also destitute of a firm
biological foundation; but it was based upon extensive materials, and
was animated by a certain instinct for what was important. His “Traité
des Dégénérescences” was published in 1859. Thus originated the
catchword “degeneration,” which remains current to-day, without having
even yet acquired any definite signification. Now it is used to denote
the neuropathic constitution; now, again, to denote the hereditary
predisposition to psychoses. According to some this predisposition is
latent, and manifests itself only by physical stigmata of degeneration;
others regard the degenerate as being mentally as well as physically
abnormal, and as suffering, either before the onset of actual insanity
or in the entire absence of the latter from mutability of mood and
temper, obsessive ideas, moral defects, and one-sided intellectual
endowment; yet others use the term “degeneration” to denote a vague
diathesis—a mingling of tendencies to disturbances of metabolism and to
neuropathies.

More recent French investigators distinguish between “higher” and
“lower” degenerates, and include in these categories almost the entire
province of mental disturbances, severe neuroses, and criminality.
German investigators go so far as to explain that most human beings are
degenerates, and Moebius held that the repulsiveness of the majority of
his fellow-creatures spoke in favour of this view.

Morel, through the vagueness of his definition of degeneration
(“déviation maladive du type humain”), was himself partly to blame for
the unsatisfactory development of the whole doctrine. He had correctly
observed that unfavourable conditions of life—for example, the lack of
legislative enactments for the protection of factory workers during the
middle of the last century—transformed the entire outward appearance of
those exposed to such conditions; but he failed to distinguish between
inherited and acquired characteristics, nor did he ask himself if and
how acquired characteristics are inherited; and he omitted to determine
at the outset of his inquiry what were the precise characteristics of
the type, deviations from which he was recording. With the exception of
Lombroso, those who, after Morel, dealt with the problem of degeneration
ignored the fact that these problems transcend the narrow limits of
pathology to trespass on the wider province of biology, and failed to
see that the problems in question are those of human variability, of the
laws of inheritance, and other anthropological questions. Prichard, the
distinguished ethnologist, widely regarded (in company with the English
prison surgeons Thomson and Nicolson) as a predecessor of Lombroso, was
the first to detect what is typical in the outward appearance of old
“gaol-birds,” and to put forward, in explanation of confirmed
criminality, the conception of moral insanity. This moral monstrosity
was to be regarded as correlated with the abnormal physical
characteristics.

Lombroso found it necessary again and again to elaborate the doctrine of
moral insanity; and in the long-continued campaign against the
misunderstandings to which his theory of the _homo delinquens_ was
exposed, that doctrine played a much more important part than Morel’s
theory of degeneration.

It is incorrect to speak of Prichard and Morel as _predecessors_ of
Lombroso, in a sense implying that the latter was influenced by either
of the two former in the inception or development of his teachings. Just
as little is it true of Gall, whose work was justly estimated by
Lombroso as early as the year 1853, as we learn from his brief work on
the correlation between sexual and cerebral development—“Di un fenomeno
fisiologico commune ad alcuni nevrotteri.”[8]




                               CHAPTER II
                         CRIMINAL ANTHROPOLOGY


Lombroso was led to formulate his doctrine of the criminal, not through
the influence of the earlier workers in the same field, whose names were
mentioned at the end of the last chapter, but as a natural consequence
of the idea which dominated his whole mental development. This leading
idea—a part of the teaching of anthropological materialism—is, on the
one hand, that a man’s mode of feeling, and therewith the actual conduct
of his life, are determined by his physical constitution; and, on the
other hand, that this constitution must find expression in his bodily
structure. He was led to the more definite formulation of this idea by
chance anatomical discoveries (_vide_ _Arch. ital. delle malattie
nervose_, and also _R.C. dell’ Istituto Lombardo_, 1871, v., fasc.
18)[9] in the corpses of criminals, one of which, the so-called “median
occipital fossa,” had not been noticed by previous observers; this is
found in most of the lower mammals, as well as in many monkeys. This
first discovery of the kind has since been supplemented by a large
number of others: in part such as were in the first instance most
carefully observed by Lombroso and his pupils; in part those described
by other anthropologists as “theromorphs”; in part those enumerated by
Darwinian naturalists as “atavisms”—that is, characters regarded and
described as vestiges inherited from the prehuman ancestors of our
species. If we compare the writings of those zoologists and anatomists
who treat of these questions, with those of Lombroso and his followers,
we cannot fail to notice the complete independence of the Italians, and
at the same time their more comprehensive grasp, and their better
knowledge of prehistoric data. The anthropologists of the Italian school
usually went to work in the following way. If in examining the body of a
criminal they came across a theromorph in any organ, or observed any
other unusual structure, they propounded certain questions regarding the
peculiarity, viz.:

1. Is this peculiarity present in any of the authentic remains of
prehistoric man, and, if so, how often is it met with in these, as
compared with the frequency of its presence in the bodies of criminals?

2. Is it met with in the lower races of man, and, if so, how often? (The
answer to this question is obtained by examining the skulls, etc., of
these lower races, to be found in European museums.)

3. Is it found in the higher apes, and, if so, is it an occasional or a
constant feature?

4. Is it found in other species of the group of primates?

5. Is it found in animals lower than these in the scale of
classification?

6. Is it found in human beings presenting congenital morbid anomalies;
more especially is it found in epileptics and in idiots?

It is easy to understand that such investigations are very laborious. In
order to throw light on the meaning of comparatively insignificant data,
it may be necessary to organize most comprehensive researches. Unceasing
care and indefatigability in such isolated observations, and in the
interpretation of their meaning, is one of Lombroso’s highest claims to
honour. For this reason, his books and the thirty volumes of his
archives will remain for many decades to come a rich mine of discovery
for anthropology, as soon as this science returns from the study of
Mongols and Australians to the examination of contemporary Europeans. As
a result of these investigations, the fact has been established that,
above all in the skulls and the brains of criminals, but also in other
parts of the skeleton, in the muscles, and in the viscera, we find
anatomical peculiarities, which in some cases resemble the characters of
the few authentic remnants of the earliest prehistoric human beings, in
other cases correspond to the characters of still extant lower races of
mankind, and in yet others, correspond to the characters of some or all
of the varieties of monkey.

From these facts Lombroso draws a somewhat rash conclusion—namely, that
there are born criminals, representing the type of mankind which existed
before the origin of law, the family, and property, and that the
representatives of long past conditions thus thrust upon our own time
are incapable of respecting the security of life and property and other
legal rights; but, bold as this conclusion seems, it has, none the less,
all the qualities of a scientific conjecture, inasmuch as it harmonizes
with all the known facts, and enables us to deal in an orderly and
critical manner with the material upon which it bears.

I leave the question open whether we are to regard this idea as a theory
or merely as a hypothesis; but it is necessary to point out, in
opposition to the obstinate assertions of Lombroso’s opponents, that the
Italian school of anthropology has never maintained the proposition that
all persons who come before European courts of justice upon criminal
charges, or all who are confined in the criminal prisons of Europe, are
the unchanged descendants of the Neanderthal men, who hunted the
cave-bear with stone arrows. Put as concisely as possible, the doctrine
of the Italian school runs as follows: Born criminals exist, presenting
typical characters, both bodily and mental, and they owe their peculiar
organization to the fact that their development has been affected by an
atavistic reversion. It is impossible here to give particulars showing
the manner in which, in the five successive editions of “L’ uomo
delinquente,” this conception becomes gradually more clearly defined.

I may be permitted to make some further observations regarding the
nature of this atavistic reversion. There is not one single
characteristic of the human anatomy which is not the product of
inheritance. The existing type of the European mixed race appears to be
a permanent type; or rather, owing to the fact that the struggle for
existence of our time takes an almost exclusively economic form, and
that in consequence of this the brain has received a preponderant
importance, the present phase of human evolution affects the brain only
(in women, unfortunately, as well as in men); if any other organ than
the brain is influenced by selection in modern man, it is affected
solely or mainly on account of its correlation with brain development.

Naturally, future extensive changes in the size and shape of the brain
will ultimately give rise to changes more or less extensive in
neighbouring organs also, such as the bones of the skull, the teeth, the
jaws, the external ear, and the upper cervical vertebræ. But for the
brief period which the individual investigator has under his observation
in the course of his life, the human species may approximately be
regarded as a permanent type. Now our most enduring possessions in the
way of bodily characteristics are inherited from very remote
ancestors—they are atavisms. The great weight of the brain, the upright
forehead, the large facial angle, peculiar to the European, have been
inherited by him from his ancestors of the historic epoch; on the other
hand, the number and shape of his teeth, the structure of his
sense-organs, the arrangement of the fissures and convolutions of his
cerebral cortex, the number and form of the mammary glands, the
configuration of the upper limbs—these the European shares with the
so-called anthropoid apes, with whom in other respects also he possesses
a very close blood-relationship. Finally, the number of our fingers and
toes, and the structure of the various tissues, as demonstrated by the
microscope, are common to us and to the great majority of mammals;
whilst innumerable other physical characteristics are shared by us with
the lower vertebrata. Thus most of our bodily peculiarities are derived
from our prehuman ancestors; they are atavisms, interesting antiquities.
But if this be so, then the occasional appearance of one or two
additional atavistic characters, whether these be derived from the men
of the ice-age or from those of the tertiary period, or date back to the
still undiscovered ape-men of a yet earlier day, or to the half-apes, or
even to our remote fish-like progenitors, is hardly so incredible an
occurrence as to demand that the thunderbolts of sterile anthropometry,
so long carefully cherished by Virchow, should be launched against the
heretic Lombroso.[10]

Modern man has freed himself from much that was rooted in the blood and
bone of his forefathers. But unquestionably he has not freed himself
from all that was so rooted, and therefore it need not surprise us to
encounter individuals who exhibit, firmly fixed either in their bodily
or in their mental organization, characteristics which in the majority
have been weakened or have disappeared.

Such individuals, exhibiting characters no longer possessed by the
European permanent type, but still common to the most primitive extant
races of mankind, such as the Old Peruvians, the Papuans, and the
Australian blacks, and common also to the other primates, are found
among criminals, as Lombroso showed, with remarkable frequency—in fact,
to the extent of more than 40 per cent.—and with especial frequency
among those whose first crime is of a serious nature, and among those
who have for many years been living for and by crime.

In addition, we meet with numerous characters, either not atavisms, or
not yet regarded as atavisms, but which are or may be rather of a morbid
nature. Thus, the skull or the brain of a criminal may exhibit, in
addition to dubious atavistic characters, certain morbid features or
signs of past disease. It is, indeed, by no means improbable that a
congenital atavistic special predisposition may only become active to
such an extent as to lead to a criminal act in consequence of some
superadded disease; but in such a case it is idle to dispute whether we
have to do with a congenital, an insane, or an alcoholic criminal.

If Lombroso’s teaching were based solely upon the examination of the
skulls and brains of criminals to be found in European collections, its
foundation would unquestionably be too narrow. But it is based, in
addition, upon the anthropological examination of many thousands of
living criminals—an examination quite as thorough as that carried out by
an anthropologist in the case of a savage tribe which he has crossed the
world to study.

The examination of living criminals cannot, of course, take into account
the convolutions of the brain, or the fossæ, foramina, and processes on
the inner surface of the skull. The first place must here be given to
the external measurements of the head.

Now, as regards many of the problems of anthropology, it is left to the
examiner to decide whether he will describe the facts he has to record
by means of figures or ratios, or by means of a catchword descriptive of
some visible peculiarity of shape or of some other objective fact.

Thus the presence of a thick bony prominence in the middle of the hard
palate (torus palatinus) may, of course, be indicated by simply
recording the numerical results of the measurements of the palate; but,
on the other hand, we may prefer to state that one man has a slightly
developed torus palatinus, another a large torus, a third none at all,
and so on.

Another important character gives to the face, when seen from the front,
an extremely typical shape. This is a great lateral extension of the
malar bones, or, to speak more precisely, of the zygomatic arches. This
condition may be denoted simply by the one word, _eurygnathism_, which
describes it amply and aptly. On the other hand, instead of employing
this term, we may, in the case of each person examined, record the exact
width of the face between the malar eminences, and note also the
relation of this measurement to the width of the forehead.

As regards characteristics of form, however, it is much more convenient,
and at the same time conveys a much more vivid impression, to denote
these merely quantitative variations, and also relations perceptible
only through comparison, by means of a generally descriptive
terminology, which must not, of course, be confused with the precise
description of actual structures.

Employing this method, we have a lengthy register of
crimino-anthropological characters, and in the following table I append
a fragment of such a register:


                        I. PRIMATOID VARIETIES.

A. AFFECTING THE SKULL.

  CEREBROGENOUS.

      (_a_) _Direct Cerebrogenous._

          1. Frontal submicrocephaly (expressed in the relative and
              absolute smallness of the brain, especially in the
              transverse diameter). Criminals, 41 per cent.

          2. Narrowing of the cranio-facial angle at the base of the
              skull, leading to prognathism.

             Occurrence: In all primates, in negroes, Papuans,
               Australian blacks, etc. Criminals, 60 per cent.

          3. Receding forehead.

             Occurrence: According to Lombroso, in 19·4 per cent. of
               4,244 criminals. According to Kurella, in criminals from
               Upper Silesia, 11 per cent.; in workmen from Upper
               Silesia, 4 per cent.

          4. Often associated with 2 or 3. Middle occipital fossa.

             Occurrence: In all apes, in the anthropoids, including the
               gibbon.

             In the skulls of various races of mankind—

                                                 Per cent.
              Ancient Peruvians                  15
              Australian blacks                  28
              Skulls provided with “students’
                sets”                             4·1
              Criminals (3,200), (Lombroso, 16
                per cent.)                       20
              Negroes                            10
              Prehistoric skulls                 14·3

      (_b_) _Indirect Cerebrogenous Varieties._

          1. External angular process of the frontal bone abnormally
              large. In criminals (704), 11·9 per cent.

          2. Excessive size of orbits (exceeding the highest degree of
              Mantegazza’s scale of the index cranio-orbitalis)—

                                                 Per cent.
              Lombroso                              9
              Kurella                               8·2
                                                  (of 218
                                                  cases)

          3. Abnormal width of frontal sinuses—

              Criminals                             13
                                                  (of 252
                                                  cases)
              Skulls provided with “students’
                sets”                                4

          4. Strongly developed superciliary ridges—

          Lombroso:

              Skulls provided with “students’
                sets”                                    7
              Criminal skulls (out of 253)              13

          Kurella:

              Living workmen                      7
              Living criminals                   16
              Italian murderers                  41·7

          5. High (internal) frontal crest. The mean height of the
              frontal crest is normally 3·8 mm.; in criminals the mean
              height is 5·4 mm. In 25 per cent. of criminals it exceeds
              7 mm., and in 35 per cent. of these latter it is
              associated with the presence of an internal occipital
              fossa.

      (_c_) _Marked Development of the Antagonism between Brain
          Development on the one hand, and Development of the Facial
          Portion of the Skull on the other, the latter predominating._

          1. Strongly developed temporal crest, nearer than usual to the
              sagittal suture.

          Distance between the two temporal crests, measured across the
              sagittal suture—

                                                       Mm.
              Gorilla                                 0·10
              Eskimo                                    80
              Skulls provided with “students’
                sets”                                  125
              Skulls of murderers                       70

          2. Torus occipitalis—

                                                 Per cent.
              Criminals (Lombroso’s results)     31·7
              Murderers (Lombroso’s results)     75

          3. Eurygnathism—_i.e._, abnormal breadth of the face at the
              level of the zygoma. This is a common characteristic in
              the oldest human remains (skulls from Gibraltar,
              Cro-Magnon, and Furfooz), and in the lower races of to-day
              (the circumpolar tribes).

                                                 Per cent.
              Convicts sentenced for robbery
                with murder                         37
              In 1,567 criminal heads               18

          4. Excessive height of the upper jaw.

This table exhibits the characters visible in the skull in a definite
class only, those whom in my “Naturgeschichte des Verbrechers” (“Natural
History of the Criminal”) I have, with Lombroso’s approval, designated
“primatoid.” Granted that they are typical of the criminal, it has none
the less often been maintained that the Italian school is not justified
in speaking of a criminal type, for the reason that not one of the
individuals described exhibits all these peculiarities. How, then, it is
said, can a criminal type be abstracted from such utterly heterogeneous
abnormalities?

This really depends upon the possibilities of abstraction. Academically
correct anthropologists continue to dispute regarding the types of the
most important races of mankind, whilst description is always preceded
by perception, and perception is not always in a position to comprehend
the typical; he who is not endowed with a sense for the significant will
see nothing but the insignificant. But there is something extremely
typical in the commonest and most important characteristic of the
criminal nature—namely, the coexistence of several primatoid characters
in the same individual. (Characters are termed “primatoid” which are
present in all primates, but which in the normal human being are
developed very slightly—in part, indeed, so slightly developed as to be
almost imperceptible. But in many criminals these peculiarities, which
are chiefly physical, are either more strongly marked than in the normal
European, or else they make their appearance in the criminal in a form
in which in the normal European they are entirely unknown, whereas they
are present in the members of many savage races, as well as in primates
lower down in the scale.)

There is one character, however, by which the primates in general are
distinguished from the lower mammals, whilst in the human species it is
far more strongly marked than in other primates; but in the criminal
this character is often so little developed as hardly to reach the
degree characteristic of prehistoric human remains. The character in
question is the greater development of the cranium (dependent upon the
more powerful development of the cerebral hemispheres) in association
with a lesser development of the jaws and their appendages. In this way
the direct cerebrogenous characters originate; and with these are
associated yet other characters, evidently in part mechanically
dependent on the cerebrogenous characters, but in part arising from
these in a different way. To this category belongs prognathism—the
condition in which the upper jaw protrudes markedly in front of the base
of the skull, so that when the face is viewed in profile, the region of
the incisor teeth appears very prominent. The skulls of the lower races
of mankind are prognathous, and still more prognathous are the skulls of
the anthropoid apes. Directly associated with prognathism is another
characteristic of the criminal type—namely, the forehead which “recedes”
markedly as it rises; and associated with the receding forehead is a
marked projection of the “superciliary ridges.”

It is well known that the two earliest known human skulls—that of the
Neanderthal and that of Spy—both exhibit to a high degree the two
characters last mentioned. If we compare with these the drawing in
Lombroso’s “Archivio di psichiatria” (vol. ii., 1882) of the skull of
Gasparone (the brigand celebrated under the name of “Fra Diavolo”), we
cannot fail to recognize a striking example of atavism.

One of the most remarkable of these characters is the middle occipital
fossa, first described by Lombroso, whose dependence upon the formation
of the cerebellum is still open to dispute. In any case it is a
well-marked primatoid character, for it is present in all the higher
primates, with the exception of the gorilla, the chimpanzee, and the
orang-utan. The middle occipital fossa was found to be present in 4·1
per cent. of the skulls provided with “students’ sets” that were
examined (but it must be remembered that such skulls always include a
certain proportion of the skulls of criminals). In prehistoric skulls
the character was present in 14·3 per cent.; in ancient Peruvian skulls
in 15 per cent.; in Australian blacks in 28 per cent.; in all the
criminal skulls examined it was present in 20 per cent. The significance
of such a fact as this cannot be gainsaid; and it is not surprising that
its discovery by Lombroso, the pupil of Panizza, made a profound
impression, more especially in view of the fact that he was then about
to bring to a close his comparison of the European with the melanodermic
races.

The book in which Lombroso instituted this comparison, “L’ uomo bianco e
l’ Uomo di colore,” was published in 1871 by Sacchetto of Padua, after
the manuscript had spent three years in vain wanderings from publisher
to publisher. In this work the writer asserted the common descent of the
higher apes and of the human species from an unknown primate, supporting
his contention by means of anthropological data. Darwin’s “Descent of
Man” was published while Lombroso’s work was in the press. The latter
displays the remarkable knowledge of comparative anatomy which Lombroso
owed to his teacher Panizza. It displays also a wide knowledge of
ethnological literature, and a thorough acquaintanceship with the
previous discoveries regarding prehistoric man (including those made at
Cro-Magnon, Hohlenfels, etc., during the years 1868–1870); and it shows,
in addition, the author’s remarkable talent for the discovery and
utilization of fruitful analogies.

I do not propose to consider here the various anomalies and
malformations of the skull discovered, described, and enumerated by
Lombroso and his pupils; but on account of their importance in relation
to the criminal physiognomy, we may mention that an abnormal widening of
the face (due to an exceptionally great distance between the two
zygomatic arches), and an abnormal divergence of the two halves of the
inferior maxillary bone, are characteristic of the criminal type.
Subsequently to the first publication of Lombroso’s results the question
of the distance between the angles of the lower jaw was thoroughly
investigated, more especially by the Dutch anthropologists and
alienists, at the instigation of Winkler of Amsterdam, and with the aid
of a very large quantity of material.[11]

Many remarkable peculiarities in the shape of the skull, the origin of
which cannot be referred to the above-mentioned antagonism between the
development of the cranium and that of the facial portion of the skull,
depend upon abnormalities and disturbances in the sequence and extent of
the ossification of the sutures of the skull. We know that the flat
bones of the skull-cap grow principally at the edges, with which they
come into contact one with another, and that normally they continue to
grow in this way as long as growth continues in the subjacent portions
of the brain; but if such a suture undergoes premature ossification,
room can only be provided for the growth of the brain by the yielding of
one or more of the other sutures, whereby that diameter of the skull at
right angles to the yielding suture becomes increased. Thus a skull in
which the sagittal or interparietal suture has undergone premature
ossification (as often occurs in the Eskimo) assumes the shape of a
narrow boat (scaphocephaly).

It is probable that such sutural varieties are dependent upon the most
diverse causes, and that in many cases they are not anomalies, but
racial peculiarities or racial congenital variations, whose origin is
genetically very ancient. In the skulls of criminals examined for the
detection of sutural abnormalities these have been found in about 40 per
cent., whilst in 1,200 living criminals the frequency was as high as 49
per cent.

Among the most interesting of the sutural abnormalities are the “Wormian
bones,” by which more or less extensive deficiencies of bone along the
principal sutures are filled in. A Wormian bone found at the apex of the
lambdoid suture, where this joins the posterior extremity of the
sagittal suture, was first discovered in the mummies of the ancient
civilized race of Peru, and it has therefore been named the “Inca bone.”
It is said that all the infant Inca mummies possess this bone, and that
it is present in 15 to 20 per cent. of the adult Inca remains. Italian
observers found it in 25 per cent. of the skulls of murderers, and in 8
per cent. of the skulls of other criminals.[12]

Certain other peculiarities of the sutures of the skull have received
much attention from students of general anthropology, on account of the
fact that they constitute distinctive racial characters; but some of
these are met with even more frequently in the skulls of criminals than
in ethnological specimens, although their appearance in these latter is
considered a characteristic feature of normal anthropology.

Of great interest are measurements of the cubical capacity of dried
skulls, and also estimates of this capacity, based upon measurements of
the head taken in living criminals (although such estimates can be no
more than approximations). Be it noted in this connection that the
extreme recorded range of capacity of normal skulls is from 2,050 c.c.
(the largest) to 1,050 c.c. (the smallest); the largest recorded cubic
capacity of skull in an anthropoid ape is 621 c.c.; thus, the difference
between the cubic capacity of the largest and that of the smallest human
skull exceeds the difference between the cubic capacity of the smallest
human skull and that of the largest simian skull.

Now, collections of the skulls of criminals comparatively often contain
skulls with a cubic capacity of less that 1,100 c.c., whereas skulls as
small as this are hardly ever met with in collections of normal skulls;
skulls ranging in cubic capacity from 1,100 c.c. to 1,800 c.c., which in
collections of normal skulls are found to the extent of from 6 to 10 per
cent., in collections of the skulls of criminals have been present, in
various instances, to the extent of 17·8, 18, 65·5, and 72·2 per cent.
respectively. Skulls below the normal mean in cubic capacity, which in
collections of ordinary skulls are present to the extent of from 25 to
30 per cent., are found in the different collections of the skulls of
criminals to be present to the extent of from 30 to 60 per cent. To put
the matter in a word, the criminal’s skull is often submicrocephalic; it
is, however, necessary to point out that skulls with the very largest
cubic capacity, exceeding 1,600 c.c., are met with twice or thrice as
often among the skulls of criminals (although this is not true of the
Italian collections personally known to me) as they are among
bone-dealers’ or museum skulls. A somewhat similar characteristic is
exhibited by all the criminal characters accessible to measurement. When
the material under investigation is derived indifferently from the
general population, the extreme values recorded by measurement are
seldom encountered. Among criminals, on the other hand, these extreme
values occur much more frequently; and, indeed, the extremely _low_
values are encountered in criminals with especial frequency when the
dimension under consideration is one which usually increases as we pass
from lower to higher stages in the scale of development. For example,
great breadth of the face across the zygomatic arches is a
characteristic of lower development; in criminals (900 instances),
exceptional width and exceptional narrowness of the face in this region
occurs more frequently than in the general population; but this is true
to a greater extent as regards the maximal than it is as regards the
minimal values of this dimension of the criminal skull.

Similar relations to those which obtain with regard to the size of the
skull are found in the bodies of criminals, in respect of the size, or,
rather, the weight of the brain, since the mass of the brain must
naturally bear a definite relationship to the cubic capacity of the
skull. In my “Naturgeschichte des Verbrechers” (“Natural History of the
Criminal”), published in 1893, I have collected the data known at that
period, derived, for the most part, from Italian sources; these data
relate to 305 brains accurately examined. To understand the results here
given, it is necessary to remember that the average weight of the
European brain, the mean resultant of a very large number of weighings,
is 1,360 grammes for males, and 1,220 grammes for females. A maximum
very rarely exceeded (though it was exceeded, for example, in the case
of Cuvier, and also in that of Tourgeniew) is a brain-weight of 1,800
grammes; whilst the smallest brain-weight known in individuals who can
be regarded as having possessed normal intellectual endowments is 960
grammes for males, and 880 grammes for females. Among a very large
number of normal brains, we shall find very few indeed weighing as
little as 1,150 grammes, and a considerable number weighing more than
1,500 grammes. On the other hand, among the total number of the brains
of criminals that have hitherto been weighed, we find that brains
weighing less than 1,300 grammes form a very considerable majority;
whereas, among the brains of normal individuals, less than 25 per cent.
weigh less than 1,300 grammes. In the various collections of the brains
of criminals, we find that brains weighing less than 1,300 grammes
numbered, in one case, 62·5 per cent. (Benedikt), in a second case, 77
per cent. (Mingazzini), and in a third case, 83·2 per cent. (Mondio).

At the very time when the criminal anthropologists were making a
thorough study of this problem, the anatomists (with the exception of
Flesch of Wurzburg) and the professorial anthropologists (that is, those
in official positions who were interested in this branch of knowledge)
were vigorously contesting the idea that there was any difference
between the brains of criminals and the so-called normal brains. All the
more interesting, therefore, were the data communicated by Professor
Johannes Ranke to the German Anthropological Congress at Dortmund in
August, 1902, in association with a demonstration of plaster-casts of
the heads of decapitated Chinese criminals. According to Ranke, the
brains of criminals show no structural deviation from the brains of
normal Europeans. This was Professor Ranke’s first contention; but to
this there succeeds a little parenthesis, in which he alludes to certain
peculiarities in the conformation of the central convolutions. (So,
after all, these brains do differ from those of Europeans!) Ranke is
straightforward enough to describe the abnormalities in question, but he
adds that they are probably to be regarded as racial peculiarities. He
gives no grounds whatever for this view, but he prefers to drag in an
ethnological hypothesis of this kind rather than to commit himself to
the heresy that the brains of criminals exhibit peculiarities; the
abnormalities must be labelled “ethnological,” lest they should fall a
prize to the heretical school of Lombroso.

On the other hand, in the same address (1902), Ranke laid stress on the
fact that among the brains of criminals there is a preponderance of
exceptionally large and of abnormally small brains, and also that among
the skulls of criminals there is, similarly, a marked preponderance of
extremely large and extremely small skulls—a fact which he might have
ascertained as long ago as 1893 from a study of the very numerous tables
of measurements and weights published in my “Natural History of the
Criminal.”

Finally, in other portions of his address, Ranke approximates even more
closely to the “heresies” of criminal anthropology. He insists on the
need for a careful study of the brains of criminals, and he points out
that there are two questions to which especial attention should be paid
in future investigations of this kind. The first of these is the
question whether the possessor of a brain of medium size does not
exhibit less inclination to crime than one whose brain is either
excessively large or excessively small; and the second is the question
whether, perhaps, certain intellectual abnormalities, which readily lead
to criminal practices, may not depend upon a partial microcephaly—that
is to say, is it not possible that in certain sharply circumscribed
portions of the brain, during intra-uterine life, there may have
developed certain abnormalities corresponding to those characteristic of
microcephaly? According to Ranke, it is always possible that an indirect
connection exists between the so-called stenocrotaphy (narrowing of the
skull in the temporal region) and the criminal tendency, in so far as,
in consequence of the said narrowing of the skull, those nervous centres
by whose activity automatism is kept within bounds may have their
development partially arrested or may in some other way be
sympathetically affected.

In these remarks we find, in the first place, a reference (although one
less clear than many recorded demonstrations of Lombroso’s teachings) to
the law in accordance with which extreme dimensions of physical
characteristics occur in criminals with especial frequency; and, in the
second place, in the theoretical portion of Ranke’s utterances we
encounter the fundamental notion of criminal anthropology, which is that
the lower organization of criminals, standing nearer to the lower
animals than that of normal men, predisposes the former to the
commission of criminal acts; and more especially that in the criminal’s
skull there is no room for a brain able to hold the feelings (or, in
physiological parlance, the inhibitory apparatus) requisite to induce
normal social behaviour. I have devoted considerable space to this
address of Ranke’s because it shows how convincing are these basic ideas
of criminal anthropology, and how irresistibly they are associated with
an anthropological mode of study of this social group. But how
remarkable it is that, through a study of the brains of Chinese
criminals, a recognition of the truth of Lombroso’s doctrines should
first dawn upon a German professor of established reputation!

The study of the brains of criminals subsequently moved in two
directions: whereas Benedikt, the talented and original Viennese
investigator, and after him a number of Italian investigators, studied
the fissures and sulci by which the surface of the human brain is
divided into convolutions in such a remarkable manner; during the years
1894 to 1900, the more limited circle of Lombroso and his immediate
pupils was engaged in the study of atavistic anomalies, and of those
more delicate peculiarities of the intimate structure of the brain which
can be demonstrated only with the aid of the microscope.

Moreover, the study of the convolutions in the brains of criminals has
led to the discovery of a number of characters which may be regarded as
atavistic. Most of these are primatoid varieties—that is to say, either
they are manifestations of an abnormally slight development of those
peculiarities of the convolutions by which the members of the human
species are distinguished from the other primates, or else they are
characters which are not normally found in human beings at all, although
they exist normally in other primates. In a tabular comparison of the
differences between the human and the simian brain, we observe that
these differences are precisely those in respect of which the deviations
of the criminal brain from the normal human type of brain are also
manifested.

In other words, the human brain is an advanced type of the brain of the
primates in general, but in the brain of the criminal the resemblances
to the simian type are much more strongly marked.

It is, indeed, quite impossible to explain the abnormal moral and social
behaviour of the criminal with reference merely to the abnormal
configuration of the criminal’s cerebral convolutions. Perhaps the human
contemporaries of the cave-bear in Europe possessed a brain, and,
_mutatis mutandis_, exhibited in many respects a mode of life analogous
to that of the modern Sardinian bandit, of the London street arab, the
_voyou_ of Montmartre, or the fugitive from the Siberian mines. But in
the Stone Age there existed no economically developed society upon which
our palæolithic progenitor could become parasitic. We know almost
nothing about post-glacial man. It may be possible at some future date,
from a chart of the surface of the brain, to deduce the social
characteristics of the race; but, although at present this deduction
remains beyond our powers—and perhaps will never become easy—the
primatoid character of the cerebral convolutions of the criminal
possesses, none the less, a profound anthropological significance. No
ethnologist is able from an examination of the convolutions of a
Greenlander’s brain to deduce the national characteristics of the race
to which the possessor of the brain belonged; but, nevertheless, when we
see a brain with certain characteristics we are able to declare it to be
the brain of a Greenlander.[13]

The interesting discoveries of Roncoroni, regarding the peculiarities of
certain cells of the cerebral cortex in criminals, though widely
discredited at first, have been subsequently confirmed by Pelizzi. In
this case also it appears that we have to do with atavism (Pelizzi,
“Idiozia ed Epilessia,” _Arch. di psichiatria_, 1900, p. 409).

Not only in the skulls and brains of criminals, but also in almost all
their other organs, we find abnormalities with greater average frequency
than among the general population, and this is especially true of
rudimentary organs, those which constitute the majority of the so-called
secondary and tertiary sexual characters. Many of these abnormalities
may be regarded as primatoid or atavistic; others appear to be mainly
dependent upon disturbance or arrest of development. All alike, in so
far as they are not merely characters acquired during the lifetime of
the individual, give the impression that the criminal is a being whose
humanity is not completely developed. This does not exclude the fact
that the criminal himself, in the light of his own peculiar valuation of
social and legal value, is apt to be firmly convinced that his is a
superman.

This arrest at an earlier stage of development gives rise, in respect of
numerous traits, to an approximation in the “criminal type” to the
characteristics of one or other of the extant savage races of
mankind—races such as the Australian, etc., which, owing to prolonged
isolation from other types and, possibly, also to less rigorous
selection and therefore less marked differentiation, in consequence of a
less severe struggle for existence, have been able for thousands of
years to retain their primitive characteristics.

We are, however, compelled to assume that many savage races have been
unable to raise themselves above their present low level of
intellectual, economic, and social culture, not merely on account of the
slighter operation of the factors of differentiation, but also on
account of an inferior innate developmental capacity. In philosophical
terminology we should perhaps therefore say that the world of crime
recruits itself from among the number of the less developed individuals
of the nation concerned; for it is an obvious deduction from the law of
organic variability that among all the individuals born as members of
any civilized race there should be some who are congenitally
incapacitated to attain the normal mean level of development peculiar to
that race.

It is not proposed to deal here at any length with the innumerable
anthropological characteristics of criminals other than those found in
the skull and the brain, but the physiognomically important characters
deserve separate notice.

Like all rudimentary organs (organs, that is to say, which continue to
be transmitted in the absence of any discoverable physiological
function), the external ear (pinna, or auricle) exhibits all possible
variations. Among these variations, two only appear to be of importance
in relation to criminal anthropology—viz., the handle-shaped and
projecting ear (German _Henkelohr_) and the Darwinian tipped ear,[14]
which are met with comparatively often in criminals, the former being
found in 328 among 1,568 criminals examined, and the latter in 189 out
of 1,187; rare in comparison with these is the so-called Morel’s ear, in
which the external margin of the auricle (the helix) is not folded upon
itself. Morel’s ear is a sign of a congenital tendency to severe nervous
troubles, and it is a remarkable fact that this character is common in
prostitutes.

According to my own observations, in addition to the two abnormalities
in the shape of the external ear already mentioned, we sometimes find in
criminals other strongly marked malformations of the ear; and as in the
case of other abnormal characters in criminals, so also in the case of
those of the ear, the anomalies are met with more frequently in
proportion as the crime for which the man was condemned was grave in
character, and in proportion also to the intensity with which the
criminal tendency has been manifested in the course of life.

The length of the auricle is also subject to great variations in
criminals. In Europeans the normal length of the ear lies between 51 and
60 millimetres (2 and 2·36 inches); it is longer than this in Mongols
and Indians, shorter in Malays, Papuans, and Australians; shortest in
Nubians, Negroes, and Bushmen. In this respect also (_i.e._, in the
greater range of variation) criminals resemble savage races rather than
civilized. According to the measurements of Frigerio, great length of
the external ear is in thieves and robbers even more characteristic than
great length of fingers, which latter, however, is also something more
than proverbial merely.[15]

If we endeavour to combine the physiognomical peculiarities of the
criminal type with the data of anthropological investigation, we obtain
a somewhat monotonous picture in widely different climates,
notwithstanding the fact that it is not permissible to speak of a
perfectly uniform type. The reason why this is impossible is one to
which I have already alluded more than once—namely, the fact that the
extreme cases, very great or very small values of linear dimensions,
surfaces, and weights, of the human body and its parts, are encountered
far more frequently among the inmates of our great prisons than they are
among an equivalent number of non-criminals; for example, among several
hundred factory employés, soldiers, emigrants—in a word, any other
category of mankind. It must not, however, be supposed that what we find
is, in one-half of the criminals we examine, that everything is too
large, and in the other half, that everything is too small. What we find
is: one dimension too large, and another dimension too small, side by
side in the same individual. An extremely common combination is: too
small a cranium, with jaws unduly large; beard too scanty; ears too
large. As regards an immediate general impression, and on superficial
observation, there can be no question of a “type.” The type first
becomes manifest as a result of intimate study. Anthropometrically, the
criminal type represents the extreme values; zoologically, it represents
the primatoid characters; developmentally, cases of incomplete
development, such as are found here and there in all nationalities. Such
is the meaning of the doctrine of the criminal type, which,
intentionally or unintentionally, has been continually misunderstood.

In respect of an immediate general impression, a well-marked example of
the criminal type attracts attention less by the expression of the face
than by the permanent structural peculiarities of the skull and the
face, more especially the smallness of the skull as a whole or in the
frontal region, the receding forehead, the large frontal sinuses,
prognathism of the upper jaw, and massiveness of the lower jaw,
prominent malar bones, and all kinds of anomalies in the shape of the
skull. The large, pale face is often very striking, with scanty beard,
thick, usually dark, hair, and large projecting ears. The nose is
commonly long and straight; in some cases it is bulky, with a wide,
ill-defined bridge. A well-formed, symmetrical nose is extremely rare in
the criminal type. Asymmetry of the face and a crooked nose are so
typical that realistic painters, from the period of the Early Renascence
down to the days of modern naturalism, depict these peculiarities
whenever they are painting rascals, vagabonds, executioners, condemned
criminals, and the like. I may mention, more especially, Goya, Gavarni,
Géricault, Canon, Wiertz, Leibl, etc. In Géricault’s drawing, “Tête d’un
Supplicié” (“Head of an Executed Criminal”), the asymmetry of the nose
is very clearly represented; whilst the broad, deeply-furrowed face, the
thin moustache, the narrow and receding forehead with prominent
superciliary ridges, the prominent cheek-bones, the heavy lower jaw, and
the irregular teeth, combine to constitute the complete criminal type.

The physiognomy of the criminal is naturally dominated by the traces
left on the face by the habitual modes of expression. Youthful criminals
have, for the most part, a dull or a frivolous appearance. The life of
crime when they are free, and the prison life when they are not free,
combine to produce a permanent imprint of anger and obstinacy, cunning
and hypocrisy. Obstinacy and anger are often expressed by a permanent
compression of the lips, marked wrinkling of the forehead, and a wild
look in the eyes. This last, quite by itself, often suffices to betray
the criminal nature, especially in the faces of women.

Elderly criminals often lose the energetic expansive expression, which
during prolonged periods of confinement they have endeavoured to
transform into a submissive mien—often, however, with but partial
success, resulting in a peculiar form of the superciliary arches, which
assume the appearance of an _S_ lying on the side. In others, the
dominant brutality is marked by a one-sided grin, or by restless facial
movements. Lombroso made some valuable observations regarding the
peculiar look of the criminal, which he often demonstrated to me
personally. The cold, wild glance of the murderer, and the restless
glance of the thief, are unmistakable. The cheat and the _chevalier
d’industrie_ (sharper), attempting to play the man of integrity or the
loyal soul, betray themselves by their piercing glances. Very great
restlessness of the glance, to a degree verging on the pathological, is
often seen in murderers, alternating with a cold, glassy, fixed stare.
In the mouth may be observed all shades of cruelty and defiance; the
fawning smile of the poisoner and of the homosexual prostitute is a very
common appearance. In the deeply-wrinkled face of elderly criminals,
Lombroso’s pupil, Ottolenghi, was the first to discover a remarkable
furrow, extending across the middle of the cheek at the level of the
angle of the mouth. I have rarely seen it outside the prison walls, but
have found it with notable frequency in the convicts of Upper Silesia.
Lombroso has named it the _ride du vice_.

                  *       *       *       *       *

In this chapter I have simply attempted to give a sketch of the data of
criminal anthropology. In view of the extensive material already
available, collected by numerous observers whose methods often differ, a
scientifically adequate exposition of these data is by no means easy. It
gives little satisfaction to learn from tabular statements that such and
such characters occur with such and such frequency. What we want to know
is, what proportion of criminals in general exhibit characters of this
kind, and how many of such characters may be assembled in a single
individual.

From 5,000 cases described in the literature of the subject, for the
most part by Lombroso himself or by his immediate pupils, I have
selected those cases in which the individual had been carefully
examined, in which his life-history was thoroughly known, and in which
mental disorder could be excluded: these numbered 800. I compared them
with the cases studied by myself in the prisons of Upper Silesia, whose
records were accessible to me; from these also I excluded several dozen
as idiots or lunatics.

The material being thus rigorously sifted, very carefully analyzed, and
consisting exclusively of criminals, it was then tabulated. The results
obtained were briefly the following:

There were present

                                                           Per cent.
   At least one cerebrogenous character in                        98
   Frontal microcephaly in                                        57
   Three or more cerebrogenous characters in                      40
   Primatoid characters in                                       100
   Three or more primatoid characters in                          60
   Primatoid characters in the brain (post-mortem)                47
   Varieties of the pinna in                                      41
   More than three characters of any of the above kinds in        77
   More than five characters of any of the above kinds in         33

From this we learn that among those repeatedly convicted of serious
crime in Western and Middle Europe, no less than 60 per cent. exhibit
several distinctive characters, indicating the existence of an abnormal
congenital predisposition.




                              CHAPTER III
     OPPOSITION TO LOMBROSO’S VIEWS—WOMAN AS CRIMINAL—THE POLITICAL
                      CRIMINAL—CRIMINAL PSYCHOLOGY


In the first fierce campaign against criminal anthropology two
objections are repeatedly encountered. One of these points out the
absence of distinctive anthropological characters in female criminals;
the other contests the conceivability of the anthropological unity of a
social group whose sole link of union consists of a concept so variable
in time and place as is the concept of crime.

The latter of these two objections was, of course, controverted by
Lombroso in part on purely conceptual grounds; but in addition to this
he has shown that the criminal group in which the idea of crime is so
relative that the criminal of yesterday may be the judge to-day, whilst
the judge of yesterday may to-day be the criminal—to wit, the category
of political criminals—he has shown that this criminal group may, with a
little criticism, readily be resolved into geniuses, enthusiasts, fools,
rogues (and, finally, the crowd these carry along with and after them);
and that in every revolution—even the most desirable one—old-established
professional rascality and newly-awakened cruelty find a most suitable
field for the display of their dangerous attributes. By means of the
study of a large number of regicides, and also that of the most notable
personalities of the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth
century, of the fight for Italian unity, the uprising of the Paris
Commune, and the Russian terrorism of our own day, he demonstrates this
truth beyond dispute.

The other objection, regarding the lack of distinctive anthropological
characters in female offenders, demanded for its answer very
comprehensive studies in a previously neglected field; these researches
were undertaken in co-operation with G. Ferrero, and resulted in the
publication in 1893 of the widely read work on “Woman as Criminal and
Prostitute.”[16]

The Introduction to this book, 180 pages in length, appears to me to be
the most interesting and remarkable piece of work Lombroso ever issued.
Even his opponents never denied his all-embracing culture and
extraordinarily wide reading, nor his brilliant intuitive powers and
bold faculty for combination; on the other hand, his most zealous
advocates and adherents have always complained of his obvious neglect of
critical examination of his sources of information, of analytical
treatment and systematic arrangement of his material, and of
comprehensive presentation and definitive architectonic. But nowhere
else are his merits so strikingly manifest, and nowhere else are his
defects less conspicuous, than they are in this brilliant description of
the biological and physiological characteristics of woman and accurate
survey of the differences between the sexes. In part, indeed, the work
under consideration may owe its conspicuous merits in point of style and
arrangement to the fact that Lombroso’s own deficiencies in these
respects were supplemented by the assistance of his collaborator and
subsequent son-in-law, G. Ferrero, the author of the celebrated “History
of the Roman Empire.” However this may be, Lombroso in this work
penetrates deeply into the science of general biology, and endeavours,
having regard to the characters found by him to differentiate woman from
man, to formulate a comprehensive law of sexual differentiation in
general.

He refers this differentiation to the fact that the whole organization
of woman is predestined to motherhood, and to the fact that any other
professional activity of whatever kind is hardly possible to her, or, if
possible, only on account of an abnormal and degenerative
predisposition.

With this dominant position of motherhood in woman he correlates also
two facts of great importance in the anthropology of the female
offender. The first of these is the much lesser variability of
women,[17] owing to which women in general exhibit less marked special
differentiation than men; consequently such deviations from type as do
occur in women are far more significant than similar deviations
occurring in men, and therefore in women very great importance must be
attached even to isolated theromorphs. The second fundamental fact is
the lesser general sensibility and lesser sensibility to pain of women
as compared with men.

Both these phenomena of sexual differentiation are more strongly marked
among civilized races than they are among savages. Thus, according to
Lombroso’s investigations, the female skull, especially in the civilized
races, resembles rather the skull of the child than that of the adult
male, and this is especially the case as regards its frontal and facial
portions.

Lombroso made an exhaustive study of the problem of the origin of the
greater development of sympathy in the female sex, and discussed how,
notwithstanding this fact, the frequent tendency to cruelty in women can
be explained: he sees in this one of those contrasts which are common in
the sphere of the emotional life, but which, with progress in
civilization, tend to disappear, owing to the development of sympathetic
feelings. The rest of the emotional life of woman is also adapted to her
profession of motherhood; and this is true, above all, of the sexual
feelings, which thus seem to be constructed almost entirely upon a
“masochistic” basis. Strong erotic feelings, when they do occur in
women, are, according to Lombroso, an approximation to the masculine
type; they are, that is to say, abnormal in women. In respect to moral
development, he regards woman as inferior to man. “We cannot, indeed,
say that woman displays to the same degree as the child the lineaments
of moral idiocy, for she is saved from this by her endowment with
maternal love and with sympathy. Fundamentally, however, woman remains
non-moral, and this often precisely in consequence of her sympathy. She
exhibits numerous traits of character ... which prevent her from
approaching to the same degree as man that balance between rights and
duties, between egoism and altruism, which is the ultimate goal of moral
development.”

By means of historical and ethnological data, the importance of which,
notwithstanding the criticism of Westermarck, has not been shaken,
Lombroso endeavours to prove that during the long ages of the life of
prehistoric humanity certain conditions were generally dominant in the
sexual life which are now regarded as constituting prostitution—that is
to say, he considers that prostitution and prostitutes at the present
day are reversionary or atavistic phenomena. The intimate description
given by Lombroso of the psychical life of the prostitute has notably
contributed to our interpretation of prostitution in the atavistic
sense. This explains why it is that among prostitutes the criminal type
is found more frequently and more markedly than it is even among female
criminals.

Thus, for Lombroso, the prostitute, even more than the homicidal robber,
is the genuine typical representative, the prototype, of criminality—the
counterpart of the male major criminal; and in social co-operation with
the latter, the prostitute gives rise to the institution of
soutenage.[18]

The world of feminine crime, in so far as it is not allied to
prostitution, is regarded by Lombroso as constituted only to a very
slight extent of true criminal natures: “A small group of women, marked
with very severe stigmata of degeneration, almost more numerous than
such stigmata are in male criminal types, is sharply distinguished from
the great majority of women criminals, who exhibit few and uncertain
stigmata of degeneration; similarly, from the psychological standpoint,
we have to distinguish from the great mass of female criminals a small
group of women in whom we recognize more severe and more unnatural moral
anomalies than are met with in male criminals. The ordinary woman
criminal has usually been lured to crime, either by hetero-suggestion or
by very powerful temptation, and her moral sense will often be found to
be unimpaired, or, at any rate, not entirely destroyed.”

In other words, women criminals—who in civilized countries are only from
one-fifth to one-tenth as numerous as men criminals[19]—are, as a rule,
criminals by passion or occasional criminals. A woman of the genuinely
criminal type is either at the same time a prostitute as well as a
criminal, or else—if her social position has saved her from becoming a
professional prostitute—she exhibits a marked anthropological and
psychological similarity to a prostitute.

By reference to a large number of cases personally examined by himself,
and with the aid of extensive statistical material, Lombroso endeavours
to establish the thesis that, as a general rule, female delinquents come
under the ban of the penal law, either from affective causes (criminals
by passion) or else from the pressure of unfavourable economic
circumstances or other external conditions (occasional criminals); that
their offences are for the most part the outcome of a normal feminine
psychical life, and are in no respect the product of emotional or moral
abnormality; that alike in the general conduct of their life and in the
particular offences for which they have been condemned we can trace the
characteristic lineaments of the womanly nature; that above all, in the
majority of them, the mother-sense is in no way diminished, or if
diminished, only to a very trifling degree, and that an increase of the
sexual impulse is in them hardly ever demonstrable.

He then goes on to prove, by the examination of an extensive material,
which he has subjected to a most careful analysis, that prostitutes and
genuinely criminal feminine types (“rea nata”) are characterized by an
utter lack of the mother-sense; that in women condemned for major crimes
an increased sexual impulse is almost invariably present, and that this
fact notably contributes to their criminal development; whereas
prostitutes are, as a rule, conspicuous for sexual frigidity, and from
childhood onwards are characterized by a lack of the sense of shame.

The case-histories, of which the book contains an abundance, show,
indeed, that genuine women criminals are endowed with the same
fundamental peculiarities which Lombroso has so fully described in male
criminals, and the prostitute is exhibited no more than as a slightly
divergent variety of the woman criminal; but the peculiar part which the
female sexual life and the endowment of the woman criminal with the
attributes of motherhood play in her psychology, give to the general
picture of the female criminal certain peculiarities which justify a
separate treatment of feminine criminal psychology.

This thesis of Lombroso’s, that among women criminals the number of
genuinely criminal types is small, whilst the number of occasional
criminals is very large, is supported by the following considerations
(quoted by him in the book we are now studying). Some years before the
publication of “La donna delinquente,” an anthropological investigation
undertaken in prisons for women by other authors showed that in women
the various characters commonly found in male criminals were less
frequently present. Varieties of the skull and of the external ear,
abnormalities of dentition, of the growth of the hair, etc., were found
only in from 10 to 20 per cent. of female prisoners, as compared with 40
to 60 per cent. of male prisoners, whereas the well-marked “criminal
characteristics” are actually more frequently present in prostitutes
than they are in male criminals.

Another important objection to Lombroso’s views on the nature of the
criminal is answered in his work on political crime and revolutions.

The very title of this book, “Il delitto politico e le rivoluzioni”
(Bocca, Turin), shows that Lombroso, whose investigations had hitherto
been concerned with the criminal only, not with crime itself, was now
working in a wider field. Although in this book the sections dealing
with the individual factors of political crime, and the descriptions of
the criminaloid, degenerate, and mentally-disordered protagonists of
political disturbance, are the fullest and at the same time the most
successful; none the less, Lombroso’s investigations into the historical
nature of revolutions and revolts, and his explanation of their
etiology, deserve our consideration, and in many cases our admiration.

Unquestionably, this is a field of ideas to which a positive mode of
treatment is especially applicable; and in this portion of his work
Lombroso has utilized with profit and ability, and not seldom with true
genius, the method of Buckle and the conceptions of the doctrine of
evolution.

Occasionally, indeed, we cannot fail to notice the lack of adequate
criticism of his sources of information, and that too often he has
failed to refer on his own account to the ultimate sources. We can
excuse him for accepting the authority of Mommsen, Grote, and Curtius,
when he is compiling a statistical survey of the political disturbances
of the ancient world; but when he came to study the great French
Revolution, it was certainly unwise to accept Taine as an authority. He
has no lack of sources of information regarding more recent history;
above all, as regards the Paris Commune, the still enduring epidemic of
assassinations and attempted assassinations of Kings and Presidents, as
regards Russian nihilism, anarchism, and the revolts and revolutions in
the Central and South American Republics—all these provide him with a
veritable superfluity of material for the study of the etiology and
psychical anthropology of revolutions and revolts. In the chapters based
upon such information as this the treatment often assumes a merely
anecdotal form, which will induce in many readers a critical frame of
mind, although the majority will find this portion also of the book
alike stimulating and interesting; and, indeed, we must not forget that
a thorough study and elucidation of the peculiar individual factors of
political disturbances is hardly possible in default of the description
of an abundance of individual traits. Thus, we read that Most exhibits
the following “stigmata of degeneration”: “repulsive ugliness, an
asymmetrical and enormous upper jaw, the eyes of a toad, flaccid skin.”
Or we are told of the misdeeds of the Communard, Allix, and are then
informed that “he had invented a telegraph, based upon the reciprocal
sympathy of twenty-four pairs of snails, each pair representing a single
letter of the alphabet.”

Lombroso begins his demonstration with a purely psychological study; he
describes the origin and effect of an impulsive tendency, deeply rooted
in human nature, to which he gives the name of “misoneism” (hatred of
novelty).[20] In the wounding of this misoneism he sees the essence of
political crime, in the glorious defeat of this sentiment, which opposes
itself to the most necessary progress, to the very being of social
evolution. Thus the political criminal appears on the one hand as a
transgressor against the most legitimate, and organically the most
deeply rooted, social tendency of human nature, and, on the other hand
(and simultaneously), as the prime advocate of every advance in
civilization.[21]

Misoneism has its roots deep in the organic life, and is merely the
expression in the social sphere of _vis inertiæ_ in the physical. For
this reason it is most powerful, not where it has made its appearance in
consciousness, or has been erected into a system of conservative
principles, but where it is dominant without those guided by this
sentiment being aware of the fact; indeed, it is most effective
precisely where, in theory and in all good faith, people aim at
progress. Thus Lombroso finds the most intensive misoneism among the
French, “who prefer the novelty of innovation, who have always loved
rather the stormy movement of revolution than its useful results ... for
everything novel that the French take to their bosoms must be of such a
kind that it does not disturb them in their habitudes. They gladly
change their fashions, their ministers of state, and their external
forms of government, but continue to cling all the while to Druidism and
Cæsarism.”

Inasmuch, therefore, as any and every advance in the condition of
humanity can be effected only very slowly, and in the face of opposition
both from within and from without, and in view of the fact that human
society instinctively clings to what is old-established, Lombroso draws
the conclusion that efforts towards progress, characterized by rapid and
violent means, are in their very nature abnormal. Even if for an
oppressed minority such methods are inevitable, they are still
anti-social in their nature—that is to say, they are criminal in
character, and often uselessly criminal, because they incite misoneism
to bring about a reaction, which will carry things back past the
original starting-point. If any innovation is to be adopted, even if in
its nature it is unquestionably progressive, it must come quite slowly,
and after long preparation. We see this fact quite as clearly in science
and in the practical arts as we do in public life. Every step out of the
beaten path, every innovation which does not correspond to a generally
felt need, and which has not had the way prepared for it by the
establishment of a new tradition, is an assault upon the power of
misoneism; and in the eyes of those—and they form the great majority—who
cling to all that is old-established, such an assault demands the
application of the penal law.

But there have been successful revolutions. How shall we, at the outset,
distinguish from these, mere frivolous attacks upon the inevitable
inertia of social life? Lombroso’s book endeavours to find an answer to
this question by means of the anthropological (physical and psychical)
study of revolutionaries, and by means of a special statistical
examination of the historical material, in search of certain factors
independent of the individual human being. The answer is expressed in
the terms of “cosmic determinism.”

We cannot fully understand the matter and the manner of this
investigation unless we are acquainted with certain earlier writings of
Lombroso’s, and more especially with his researches concerning the
nature of genius; it is necessary also to give an anticipatory account
of his ideas concerning the nature of revolution.

“Revolution is the historical expression of evolution; it is the chicken
which has outgrown the embryonic stage, and is ready for life in the
open, breaking through the shell.” This is a metaphor to which Lombroso
returns again and again. If the new development is one with whose idea
the generality have become familiar, if the old forms have become
rotten, the evolutionary impulse spontaneously breaks into fresh
channels. It is true that even then in some cases some force has to be
applied to overcome the resistance of the adherents of the old ways;
for, owing to the universality of misoneism, and to the law of inertia,
such adherents will always be found, however cogent the need for
innovation. Now, the characteristic of genius is its freedom from that
which furnishes obstacles to progress, its freedom from misoneism—at
least, in respect of progress in that particular direction towards which
the particular type of genius is directed. In genius, therefore,
Lombroso recognizes at once the source of all those tendencies which
gradually swell to form the irresistible flood of revolution, and the
helper through whose instrumentality the ultimately mature embryo is
assisted to its birth. And just as, on the one hand, the genius
accompanies a genuine revolutionary movement, one capable of
development, from its first small beginnings down to its victorious
close; so, on the other hand, the pseudo-genius, the “mattoid” criminal
or the lunatic, excites revolts which oppose themselves in vain to the
_vis inertiæ_ of society, and whose sole result is to hinder the general
course of evolution.

In this section of this remarkable book we find a notable stimulus, and
the brilliant exposition leads us to formulate all kinds of speculation.
We are induced to attempt also to draw up a prognosis. We ask ourselves
what will be the outcome of such a movement as that which was initiated
in Germany by Lassalle—half genius, half-moral eccentric—a movement
which has found its fool and its half-fool in Neve and Most
respectively, and among whose adherents even now the question is being
discussed whether the old Prussian suffrage system shall be and can be
destroyed and rebuilt by means of street-demonstrations and the general
strike.

Lombroso utilized the relations between genius and revolution in a most
remarkable manner for the purpose of studying the nature of revolution.
A notable portion of his material, and unquestionably the most
trustworthy portion, is constituted by the official statistics of the
French elections to the Chamber of Deputies in the years 1877, 1881, and
1885. In a nation whose disposition and development have been of so
monarchical a character, Lombroso proceeds, a republican vote signifies
adhesion to a revolution. “In these elections we have the numerical
expression of revolution in its legitimate form—a form entirely free
from any criminal or insurgent features.”

In a very detailed manner he then proceeds to demonstrate the complete
parallelism in France between genius and revolution—that is to say,
republican sentiment—which, if not easy to display numerically,
nevertheless is and has been universally dominant. Reference is also
made to a kind of statistical statement of genius, which was given by
Lombroso in another work, “L’uomo di genio,” 1888.[22] From these
statistics he derives an “index of genius” for every department in
France, and according to the size of this index the departments are
arranged in groups. These will be seen to correspond in a most striking
manner with the groups we obtain by classifying the departments
according to their republican or monarchical proclivities.

This analogy is pursued yet further. In a number of interesting tables,
diagrams, and charts, the French departments are grouped according to
their configuration (mountains, hills, and plains), the geological
character of their soil (granitic and other primary formations—jurassic,
cretaceous, alluvial, etc.), according to the racial origin of their
inhabitants (Ligurian, Iberian, Cymric, Ruthenian, Gaelic, Belgic,
etc.), and for each group the predominant political tendency and the
index of genius are determined. In this way also he deduces an analogy
bordering on identity between republicanism and genius.

Apart from such analogies as these, his analysis of the electoral
results in France, and his grouping of the republican and the
monarchical departments according to the configuration of the surface,
the geological character of the soil, and the origin of the population,
are of the greatest interest; and the interest is further increased by
the accompanying commentary dealing with a mass of facts relating to
other countries. Thus, of thirty-six departments of a mountainous
character, twenty-five are republican; whereas of ten departments in the
plains, four only are republican. Lombroso gives numerous examples to
show that the inhabitants of mountainous districts are inclined to more
rapid evolutionary changes than the inhabitants of the plains, who are
more averse to novelty. On the other hand, at very lofty altitudes
indeed, an apathetic temperament and political indolence are dominant.
Thus, in Mexico, the inhabitants of districts at an altitude of over
2,000 metres (6,560 feet) above the sea-level are characterized by
passivity. The inhabitants of the capital city, which is situated at
about this altitude, are politically indifferent, and take hardly any
part in the revolutions of the country. It is the troops only, recruited
from other parts of the country, which issue the _pronunciamentos_.

The monotonous scenery of the plains induces an equable internal state
in the inhabitants, and thus strengthens in them the sentiment of
misoneism. Only the proximity of large rivers, on which great industrial
towns grow up, encourages a political vitality in the plains. Factors of
another order may intervene, and may counteract this monotonizing
influence of the plains. Here, above all, we note the effect of the
crossing of races, in consequence of which the Poles, through contact
and intermixture with the Germans, have undergone a notable development
in civilization and political life in advance of so many other Slavonic
races. In this connection, Lombroso lays especial stress upon the first
effects, the nascent state, of such intercrossing of races, and refers
the rapid decline in Polish evolution to disappearance of this _status
nascendi_. (This notion of Lombroso’s is supported by the fact that the
partition of Poland was followed by a renewed crossing of the Polish
with the German stock, and there ensued upon this, in the middle third
of the nineteenth century, and again to-day, in addition to the
blossoming of a quite unexpected industrial, scientific, and literary
quickening of the race, a recrudescence of the Polish revolutionary
spirit. For a long time the force produced by the nascent state seemed
exhausted, and the revolutionary spirit of the Poles appeared to have
become metamorphosed into clericalism.)

In addition to the permanent factors of soil and race, by means of which
a nation is rendered capable of pursuing a successful course of
development through a series of fortunate revolutions, there are other
and variable influences which give rise to a continuous rebellious
unrest. Pre-eminent among these influences is a climate characterized by
periods of rapidly rising temperature, whereas a tropical climate
induces absolute indolence in the inhabitants, so that in tropical
countries history has nothing to record regarding class-struggles,
conspiracies, and serious insurrections.

The hot season in the southern regions of the temperate climes is a
cardinal factor in the production of political disturbances. Lombroso
has proved this by the utilization of material whose official origin
appears to him to render it entirely trustworthy—namely, the data
recorded in the Calendar of Gotha for the years 1791 to 1880. In this
period we find an account of 836 revolts, rebellions, insurrections,
etc., of which 495 took place in Europe. The maximum of the European
disturbances took place in the month of July, whilst of the South
American revolts, the maximum occurred in the corresponding month of the
southern hemisphere—viz., January. The more recent records, relating to
outbreaks in Argentina and Chile, confirm this conclusion. The smallest
number of revolts occurred—in Europe, in November and December, and in
South America, in May and June. If we examine the records of the
individual European nations, we find that among all the nations of
Southern Europe the summer is the principal time of disturbance. In the
case of five nationalities (the Norwegians, Swedes, Danes, Poles, and
Irish) the spring predominates. In one case only was there a maximum of
revolts in winter; this was Switzerland, in which ten out of twenty-four
recorded outbreaks occurred during the winter season.

Another tabulation of the figures displays the predominance of the
nationalities of Southern Europe in the statistics of insurrection. In
Greece there were 95 revolts per 10,000,000 inhabitants, this being the
maximum; in Russia, down to the year 1900, there were 0·8 per 10,000,000
inhabitants, this being the minimum. Dividing Europe into three zones,
we find that in Northern Europe there were 12 revolts, in Central Europe
25, and in Southern Europe 56, per 10,000,000 inhabitants.

Even richer in facts, and more engrossing in consequence of vivid
description and apt characterization, is the analysis, in chapters vii.
to xii., of the individual factors of political crime. The significance
of age and sex are studied, and we find a detailed description of the
female protagonists of Russian nihilism, who are depicted as the noblest
examples of the “revolutionist by passion.” A description is then given
of the born criminals and the morally diseased among rebels and
insurgents, with a full account of their individual peculiarities. Proof
is submitted of the great part played in all important insurrectionary
movements by the insane and the partially insane (“mattoids”). An
elaborate account is given of the characteristics and influence of the
“political occasional criminals and political criminals by passion,” who
are closely allied to the revolutionary genius, and commonly exhibit a
noble type of character. Whereas among the French revolutionaries of
1793, among the revolters in South America, the rioters of the Paris
Commune, and the modern anarchists, Lombroso finds the most bestial
criminal natures and the most horrible moral insanity predominant, among
the heroes of the prolonged Italian struggle for freedom and among the
so-called nihilists he describes a number of anthropologically normal
and noble figures, from whom nothing is more remote than degeneration,
criminality, or mental disorder. The chapter is illustrated by a large
number of portraits, including those of Louise Michel, Ibarbar,
Reinsdorf, and Hödel, as criminal physiognomies; and contrasted with
these are the noble countenances of Mazzini, Bakunin, Scheljabow, Wjera,
Sassulitsch, Perowskaja, etc.

At the end of this first part of his book, Lombroso sums up the whole of
his material for a differential diagnosis between revolution and revolt.
Then follows the second part, which was written in collaboration with a
young jurist, the Veronese advocate Laschi. Here we have an historical
account of the genesis of political crime, with a description of the
earlier and more recent methods of dealing with it, both national and
international; and an attempt is made, from the standpoint gained in the
first part, to formulate juridically the principal elements of political
criminology, and to reconstruct the foundations of its penal repression.
The conclusion consists of a detailed account of the economic and
political prophylaxis of “political crime,” in which from time to
time—and more especially in the criticism of Italian parliamentary
government and party politics—Lombroso’s original modes of thought are
strikingly manifest. For the most part, however, these prophylactic
prescriptions have reference merely to co-operative associations,
insurance against unemployment, and a number of political measures of a
more or less “State-Socialist” character of no particular originality,
and derived, as it seems to me, in part from the ideas of Luigi Luzzati
(the present Minister President), and in part from those of Achille
Loria.

The chief merits of the book are not found here, but in its
historico-philosophical ideas, which in this concluding portion are but
slightly sketched, and in the masterly manner in which, with the aid of
a vast material, the foundations are laid of our knowledge of the
psychology of the rebel, whose lineaments are depicted with the truest
perception of nature and of history.


Lombroso’s daily contact with prisoners awaiting trial, owing to his
official position as medical officer to the prison at Turin, the
criticisms passed from the legal side upon his doctrine of the “born
criminal,” and the continued exchange of ideas with so distinguished an
expert in the theory of jurisprudence as Enrico Ferri, led him in twenty
years’ ensuing work, in which he accumulated an enormous mass of
observations of his own, and utilized the entire international
literature of the subject, to study the criminal by passion, the
occasional criminal (economic etiology of crime), the habitual criminal,
and other abnormal categories of criminals (in addition to the born
criminal)—criminal alcoholics, criminal lunatics, and criminal
epileptics. The results of all this work were incorporated in the third,
fourth, and fifth editions of “L’uomo delinquente.” From the year 1880
onwards he was assisted in this gigantic undertaking by able personal
assistants, and from this year dates the issue of his _Archivia di
psichiatria_, in the production of which he enjoyed the collaboration of
an international circle of colleagues. At the same time, the doors of
all Italian prisons were open, not to him only, but also to his pupils
and fellow-workers—an advantage which I myself occasionally enjoyed.
Beltrani-Scalia,[23] the chief of the Italian prison administration,
placed at Lombroso’s disposal the entire official material of his
department; and Lombroso utilized this, not only to strengthen and
develop his theories, but also for the foundation of a unique criminal
museum, and for the preparation of carefully-thought-out plans of penal
reform. From every quarter materials streamed in, by which hundreds of
heads and hands were kept busy. Lombroso’s grown-up daughters, Paola and
Gina, became readers, translators, actuaries, and sub-editors; and the
house in the great square of Turin, from which in the evening can be
seen the sunset glow on the peaks of the western Alps, became, not only
the collecting centre of the materials pouring in from every direction
(ultimately even from the slowly-moving Anglo-Saxon world), not only the
source of an extensive journalistic propaganda (in Germany furthered by
Maximilian Harden’s paper, _Zukunft_, which even then had a wide and
increasing circulation), but, in addition, the meeting-place of numerous
foreign investigators engaged in the study of the social and biological
sciences. Here the heavy red wine of Piedmont, which was supplied with
no sparing hand, loosened many tongues; but wine was assuredly not the
sole enlivening element in the house, in which distinguished simplicity
and a patriarchal atmosphere combined to melt the chill reserve no less
of the Prussian Privy Councillor than of the English University
Professor, so that the conversation of all was brilliant and
unrestrained.

These years of propaganda and of practical efforts on behalf of
reform—1885 to 1900—undoubtedly owed a part of their brilliancy and of
their practical fruitfulness to Lombroso’s daughters, who first by means
of their women friends (among whom I may give the leading place to the
social reformer, Madame Kuliszew), and subsequently by means of their
affianced husbands (G. Ferrero and M. Carrara), brought fresh worlds of
ideas into contact with that of their father. To the elements already
enumerated were added music and the plastic arts, and the friendship of
such artists as Bistolfi—drawings and sketches by living artists, and
casts of celebrated sculptures were dispersed among the skulls and the
books with which almost every room in the house was filled. The glorious
harmonies of Beethoven and Wagner were not only re-echoed in the hearts
alike of young and old among the audience, but also resounded from the
skulls of ancient Peruvians and from painted prison-utensils. This was
the environment from which came the masterly sketch of the nature of
woman; and thus it came to pass that the anthropology of calculus and
measuring-rule receded into the background, and was replaced by a
profound psychological insight. As a result of such stimuli, and of
others too numerous to mention, there originated the intimate analysis
of the criminal mentality, in consequence of which the criminal is no
longer regarded merely as the savage and atavistic descendant of the
prehistoric mammoth-hunter, but rather as one in whom the observer now
perceives also, and depicts with the sure hand of a master, the
lineaments of an unfortunate being impelled to crime by his passions, by
the pressure of want, by exploitation and impoverishment. At the same
time the psychological description of the born criminal nature gained
additional clearness of detail and sharpness of outline. We must look
for this description, not only in the last edition of the chief work,
but also in the numerous monographs on individual criminals whose
offences attracted public attention during these years of Lombroso’s
ripest knowledge and fullest creative force. The last of these figures
was the Parisian, Madame Steinheil.[24]

Lombroso’s criminal psychology deserves much more attention than it has
hitherto received. In relation to the practical problems of criminal
jurisprudence it is more important than were his purely anthropological
investigations, although these latter have attracted far greater popular
notice. Alike to the expert in forensic medicine and to the
psychiatrist, criminal psychology possesses greater diagnostic
importance; for it is often necessary to determine whether, in a certain
individual, acquired mental infirmity, congenital mental infirmity, or
some special and peculiar type of degeneracy, predominates. It is not
permissible for the medical jurist to argue as follows: “This individual
has remarkable physical characters and incomprehensible psychical
peculiarities, and he is therefore ill and irresponsible.” The
incomprehensible character of a crime or the enigmatical character of a
personality is not rarely used as an argument for the belief that mental
disorder, and consequent irresponsibility, exists. But this is not a
valid inference. A knowledge of the psychology of the respectable
bourgeois and of that of the ordinary philistine, or a limited
acquaintance with the insane confined in institutions, does not provide
any experience of the interweaving of complicated and peculiar motives
and feelings in the psyche of the criminal nature. A thorough knowledge
of criminal psychology, which is rare to-day,[25] and which, for obvious
reasons, is difficult to obtain, is an essential preliminary for the
distinction of criminal natures from the insane and from imbeciles.

Not infrequently it is maintained that the performer of a criminal act
cannot be normal if we are unable to discover any profit which he could
have derived from his act. The characteristic of a criminal, it is held,
is to injure others to gain a personal advantage; but to injure others
simply for the sake of doing injury is said to be characteristic of
psychological anomaly.

This assumption is contradicted by two fundamental traits of the
criminal nature—recklessness of consequences and cruelty. The
recklessness of the criminal nature leads him rather to yield to
momentary impulses than to pursue a deliberate purposive plan. The cruel
individual, not only as criminal, but also as savage, as despot, as
violent leader of a mob, takes a positive pleasure in others’ suffering.
Nothing, for example, is commoner in the school and the barrack than
such a phenomenon as this. To a certain degree, indeed, we find it in
the average man, in the normal philistine and the pedant, perhaps, more
than all, although only in a low degree of intensity. Many criminal
natures undoubtedly possess this tendency to a very high degree, and
take a positive delight in the thought of being able to inflict pain and
fear on others. But herein they merely exhibit, after their _own_
fashion, a general tendency of human nature to find pleasure in the
possession and exercise of power, and thus to feel superior to others,
and to manifest this superiority by means of the infliction of pain.

In this sphere of cruelty there is certainly no more than a quantitative
difference between the criminal nature and the normal philistine, and
least of all will one who is really familiar with the erotic life of
mankind, which is the principal sphere of the mutual infliction of
suffering, maintain that in its association with cruelty there is
anything that can be termed pathological.

Unquestionably, many crimes are committed because the injury inflicted
upon another is in some way profitable to the criminal. This, indeed, is
little more than a matter of business. But just as many crimes are
committed because the injury of another is painful to that other, and
because the criminal—the usurer, for example—actually experiences
pleasure in having given rise to others’ pain.

The profound psychologist, Friedrich Nietzsche, has detected the roots
of this phenomenon in average human nature. He speaks of the “horrible
beautiful” of crime—of the happiness of one who has completely freed
himself from the lower instincts of compassion and from the evil beast
“conscience.”

Abundant as are the materials for a special psychology of certain
specialities in crime, and extensive as was Lombroso’s acquaintance with
individual criminals, none the less his account of the elementary
qualities of the criminal nature is extremely simple. The differences
between individual criminals, who at first sight appear extremely
unlike, frequently depend merely upon the fact that the inclination to
enrich their own personality at the expense of another is associated in
the one case with a favourable, and in the other with an unfavourable,
economic position. The thievish proletarian will steal anything he sees
lying about or anything that he finds in someone else’s pocket. The
millionaire similarly disposed will not steal single purses, but will
find ways and means of emptying very numerous and very large purses. The
criminal proletarian is a petty thief or a burglar; the criminal
bourgeois founds fraudulent banks and limited liability companies, or
transforms sound undertakings into swindles, or he systematically
swindles his partners. Fraudulent bankruptcy is the leading field of
typical bourgeois criminality. Thus we get an insight into the operation
of many of the so-called “economic factors” of crime, which in
essentials amount to this, that in times of economic depression a large
number of unscrupulous persons seize opportunities for stealing bread
that has risen in price or the money that is needed for the purchase of
bread—a larger number than in more prosperous times; whereas in times of
commercial expansion the talents of the swindler on the large scale and
of the millionaire plunderer find their greatest opportunity. Moreover,
it is clear that one who has no regard for his personal reputation will,
if he is a poor man, more readily turn to the commission of offences
against property; but if he is well-to-do, he is more likely to commit
offences against the person. This is shown by the fact that those who
are well off more often offend against the health, life, and sexual
freedom of others; whilst those who are ill off more frequently commit
offences against property. And it is further shown by the fact that when
wages are rising, and the prices of the necessaries of life are falling,
crimes against the person increase in number, whilst the number of
thefts and embezzlements diminishes. This tendency is still more clearly
manifested if the rise in wages and the fall in prices are simultaneous.

In addition to cruelty, which we encounter not only in offenders against
the person, but also see frequently in the form of a lack of sympathy,
in usurers and cheats, the comparative psychology of criminals enables
us to recognize in them as permanent qualities a recklessness and
remorselessness,[26] and, in most cases, also an entire lack of
integrity—that is to say, merely negative qualities—due to deficiency in
the development of sensibility. Among positive qualities, a
characteristic one is the fatuous vanity of many habitual criminals. It
is a phenomenon of worldwide familiarity that that which in the life of
a human being was at first a means merely, ultimately becomes an
independent end—indeed, the sole aim. This we find also in the career of
the criminal, to whom crime becomes a field for vain display. The art of
pocket-picking, of housebreaking, of poisoning, ultimately becomes one
pursued for its own sake. Some have thought this almost demoniacal; but
there is nothing very singular in the practice of an acquired facility
from the pure pleasure of its clever performance—art for art’s sake.
Moreover, we see the same thing also in criminals who secretly destroy
property or secretly commit arson. Here the art of remaining
undiscovered is cultivated for its own sake.

Lombroso gives a very elaborate description of several other psychical
characters of criminals—of their religious life, and of their poetry and
their literature, which latter, in bloodthirstiness and savage
sensuality, closely resemble the tribal songs of the Australian blacks.
In his subtle observation and description of the criminal psyche, in
which he took note of the smallest details, and at the same time
combined these details into a most effective general picture, making use
alike of apparently trifling scrawls on prison walls and of
comprehensive historical studies of crime, is certainly to be found his
chief service. Here we find one of the finest examples known to modern
psycho-pathology of the minute observation of details. Lombroso shows
himself to be a true interpreter of nature, and a genius to whom, in the
depth of his insight into human nature, we can, among the moderns,
compare only Dostoieffsky, and, among those of an earlier day, only the
brilliant criminal psychologist Shakespeare.

An important circumstance in the development of the individual criminal
is the existence of a professional rascality with ancient traditions,
representing a kind of syndicated organization of the criminal
interests, associated with the equally old traditions of the receivers,
vagabonds, prostitutes, and gipsies. This has introduced into the life
of crime a conventional element, which would naturally not be able to
maintain itself unless it corresponded to the innermost nature of the
criminal. The old national capitals—Venice, Madrid, Paris, London—still
possess ancient traditions of this character; but the colossal growth of
the modern industrial towns has given rise, in addition, to the
existence of a criminal world without traditions, one which knows little
or nothing of the three leading features of the ancient
tradition—thieves’ jargon, tattooing, and soutenage. Southern Italy and
Sicily have preserved criminal organizations in the Camorra and the
Maffia, out of which there has developed a systematic taxation of the
propertied classes, and which even possess Parliamentary powers.

Side by side with the ancient thieves’ jargon, almost venerable in view
of its genuine antiquity, as shown by numerous words and phrases derived
from the Hebrew and Romany tongues, there has arisen the ever-changing
speech of the canaille, to which contributions are continually
furnished, first, by prostitutes, through whose intermediation is
effected a contact between the most diverse classes of society;
secondly, by submerged individuals originally belonging to the upper
classes; and, thirdly, by the artist world. These jargons are naturally
in a perpetual flux. They possess their classic writers, as does, for
instance, the argot of contemporary Paris in the talented Bruant, to
whom every new variation of the jargonization of speech streams down
from the summit of Montmartre, and whose songs are diffused throughout
France from thousands of small music-halls, just in the same way as
François Villon, four and a half centuries ago, disseminated the jargon
of his day in shameless but inspired songs.

Now, unquestionably, every argot possesses a criminal psychological
interest. The canaille will take the new-coined word to its heart only
when the thing or the relation described by this word expresses
something of great or supreme importance to the blackguard or the cheat.
To the burglar, the baby is important principally as a “screecher,” so
he accepts this new-coined word. To the thief, in the same way, the
fingers are “hooks,” or, in the argot of Poland, _grabka_—that which
grips. To the naturalism of the vagabond, the cook from whom he begs may
be most aptly described as _finkelmusch—finkel_ being the fireside, and
_musch_, a Hebrew word for the vulva.

The humour of every jargon lies in this—that its words are formed by the
naming of that part of the denominated whole which appears to the
name-giver to be the most important element of that whole. The
astonishing vividness and speech-forming power often recognizable in
such jargon is really somewhat atavistic when compared with the
wearisome newspaper jargon (“journalese”) of our modern books among all
civilized peoples. By means of precisely such a word-formation, directed
towards the vivid and important, did the colloquial speech of
prehistoric man originate.[27]

In tattooing we recognize allied qualities of originality and force.
Many criminals depict on their own skins their fate and their
philosophy. Naturally, most of them adorn themselves with merely
professional designs, devoid of all trace of originality; but the
standard specimens of this decorative art naturally correspond to the
taste of the customers, just as the standard specimens of any other
decorative art correspond to the taste of the public that demands it.
Æsthetically, in fact, a criminal who has his skin tattooed stands
nearer to the savage Fiji Islander than he does to the European
decorative taste of the common people, as displayed in the shops of the
working-class quarters in which chimney “ornaments” are sold. It must be
admitted that æsthetic sentiments are not very closely allied to
ethical. Nevertheless, the former are emotional stirrings, and it is in
this sphere that we must look for the fundamental traits of the criminal
nature. It is in this that we find the significance of the tattooings so
often met with in criminals, even in those who have never been
convicted, who have never been in a barrack, a shop, or a factory. In
Lombroso’s atlas we find reproductions of numerous fantastic tattooed
designs.

Thus the most important element in the psychology of the criminal is a
rudimentary development of the life of feeling in general.[28]

In an elaborate analysis of the mind of the criminal,[29] I have
endeavoured to show that this mind is dominated by the sovereignty of
the moment, a feature in which it resembles the mind of the child and
the savage. Here we have an indication that in the criminal, as in the
child and the savage, inhibition—the most important function of the
brain—is not developed[30]; for inhibition operates under the influence
of our previous experiences and of the continuous consideration of the
future consequences of our present actions. Undoubtedly, it is also
characteristic of the criminal by passion that, at the time of the deed,
the momentary motives drive out or paralyze all past experiences and all
considerations for the future. But that which, in the case of the
criminal by passion, occurs but once or a few times only during life, is
in the born criminal a continuous state, one which characterizes his
non-criminal as well as his criminal activities.

It is obvious that alcoholism—from which almost all habitual criminals
suffer—must favour the failure of inhibition. The psychology of the
criminal is, as a rule, so interpermeated with the characteristics of
alcoholism that it is often necessary to grope back into the childhood
of the individual in order to ascertain the original lineaments of his
character.[31]

The parasitism of the existence of the criminal is mainly an outcome of
economic conditions, and not an elementary feature of crime. In this
respect, criminality closely resembles prostitution, which, at least in
the modern large town, is through and through a product of parasitic
luxury.

Passing on now to consider the pressing question of the causal
connection between the psychical and the physical fundamental
characteristics of the criminal, we find that it is not possible from
the physical characters to deduce with certainty a corresponding
development of feeling. But it may well be that both series of phenomena
result from a common cause—viz., the arrest of development at a not
completely human stage of evolution. This conception of Lombroso’s—which
I myself regard as correct—is readily comprehensible by every
evolutionist, for the evolutionist must assume the inheritance of social
feelings, and therewith also the inheritance of the organic substratum
of these feelings.

In accordance with the modern standpoint of physiological psychology, we
have every reason to regard the vasomotor nervous system as a part, at
least, of the organic substratum in which, alike in the individual and
in the race, the development of feeling runs its course. A very strong
reason for believing that the predisposition to crime is based upon a
definite congenital tendency is to be found in the fact that the
inheritance of criminal tendencies is manifested also in cases in which
neither environment, nor education, nor example, suffice to account for
the phenomenon. A very large mass of materials has been collected
bearing upon this thesis, a part of which will be found in Lombroso’s
own writings, a part in Ribot’s celebrated work on “Heredity,” and a
part in my own “Natural History of the Criminal.” The most frequent
manifestations of criminal heredity take the form of a tendency to
fraud, to arson, and to sexual crime. Cruelty, also, is very frequently
inherited; and this tendency sometimes finds expression in the desire,
as a hospital nurse, to see as many operations as possible, or, at
least, to witness as many confinements as possible. The inheritance of
criminal tendencies is also shown by the frequency of criminal acts in
children; and at the present day, in the enormous increase of youthful
criminality, the primitive and original character of criminal tendencies
is most clearly manifested.

Finally, the incorrigibility of many criminals, and their innumerable
relapses into crime, afford a proof, not merely of the uselessness of
our penal systems, but also of the organic nature of the predisposition
to crime. All the experience hitherto recorded shows that those
individuals who, anthropologically speaking, exhibit the most severe
stigmatization, are also the most hopeless recidivists.

It is a point much open to dispute whether the congenital tendency to
crime is essentially a morbid predisposition; but the discussion is
profitless. Unquestionably the professional criminal throughout his life
exhibits a marked tendency to mental disorder. Many of Lombroso’s
adherents are inclined to regard insanity as a professional disease of
prisoners. It must not, however, be forgotten that debauchery, poverty,
alcoholism, and close confinement—conditions inseparable from the
criminal life—would suffice of themselves, and in the absence of any
predisposition to insanity, to induce mental disorder.

This has nothing whatever to do with the problem of the responsibility
of the born criminal. In the most exceptional case we can admit that the
criminal is strongly predisposed to become insane.

This is a suitable place in which to draw attention to the fact that
Lombroso himself emphasizes the relationships between epilepsy and the
criminal nature; and, indeed, that he draws an analogy between the
permanent psychical state of the born criminal and the conditions of
brain giving rise to epilepsy. To some extent, indeed, he regards the
two conditions as identical. His account of these relationships exhibits
the characteristic features of his mode of thought. He possessed the
impassioned tendency of the great investigator of Nature, as it was also
embodied in Darwin; and he possessed at the same time the patience of
the collector. He knew, also, how to demonstrate his results forcibly
and vividly; but he was less richly endowed with the faculty of sifting
his data, and of grouping them in accordance with a natural, and not
merely superficial, criterion. Thus it happened often enough that,
perceiving intuitive analogies, his lively imagination led him falsely
to regard them as identities. He tells us that in the criminal, as in
the epileptic, he discovered the following characteristics: “Tendency to
lead a vagabond life, inclination to obscenity, uncleanness, pride in
evil actions, a passion for scribbling, a tendency to neologism,
tattooing, dissimulation, lack of definite character, easily aroused to
wrath, megalomania, vacillations of thought and feeling, cowardice. In
epileptic and criminal alike, we find a lengthening of the personal
equation (reaction-time), when compared with the normal human being; the
same vanity, the same tendency to self-contradiction and to universal
exaggeration.” He considered that this identity was confirmed by the
similarities which can be detected between criminals and epileptics in
respect of certain forms of blunting of cutaneous sensibility and other
sensory perceptions. It must also be remembered that Lombroso’s
conception of epilepsy was a very wide one: “To-day, in fact, in
accordance with the completely harmonious results of clinical and
experimental pathological research, epilepsy has been resolved into a
circumscribed stimulation of the cerebral cortex, resulting in
paroxysms, sometimes momentary, sometimes of long duration, but always
periodic, and always superposed upon a degenerate foundation, whether
this foundation be inherited, or acquired through the abuse of alcohol,
in consequence of injury to the skull, etc.”

As regards this theory that epilepsy is a basic element in the criminal
nature, Lombroso finds a link between epilepsy and criminality in
certain types of character which, long before his time, certain
alienists—especially those of England—had described as quite specific,
and as differing entirely from ordinary insanity. As the psychiatric
name for these types, the English phrase “moral insanity” has been
widely accepted. Such cases are regarded by Lombroso as developmental
stages on the way to the formation of the criminal nature. Writing on
this subject, he says (German edition, p. 521): “Just as moral insanity
passes insensibly into its higher degree—born criminality—so also the
epileptic criminal, when his liability to acute or to larval paroxysms
has become chronic, exhibits the more advanced manifestation of moral
insanity. In the less developed periods we cannot distinguish between
these types; and just as two things which are equal to the same thing
are equal to one another,[32] so also, undoubtedly, born criminality and
moral insanity are both of them nothing more than variants of epilepsy
(Griesinger terms them “epileptoid states”).”

In order to give us a more vivid idea of these epileptoid states,
Lombroso groups them as follows:

                 First degree, larval epilepsy.
                 Second degree, chronic epilepsy.
                 Third degree, moral insanity.
                 Fourth degree, congenital criminality.
                 Fifth degree, criminality by passion.

This view has been opposed in various quarters on the ground that
Lombroso, in other parts of his leading work, explains criminality as an
atavistic reversion to primitive human types, and that, consequently, in
accordance with the same principle of equivalent values, the type of the
epileptic must also be identical with that of primitive man. This
conclusion being an impossible one, it is held that Lombroso’s whole
chain of reasoning is false. But Lombroso invokes the principle of
equivalent values in relation, not to qualitative, but to quantitative,
relations. His opponents have just as little right to use this principle
for a _reductio ad absurdum_ as Lombroso himself had to speak of
“identity” instead merely of “analogy.” It must be admitted that the
criminal and the epileptic temperaments are very closely allied, that
epileptics provide a disproportionately large contingent to the world of
crime, and that it is quite possible that genetic relationships exist
between the born criminal and the epileptic. It may well happen that
when a mother suffering from nervous or mental disorder becomes
pregnant, the brain and the whole organism of her child will be poorly
nourished, and will, therefore, not develop normally. The child may have
its development arrested at an earlier and more primitive stage,
corresponding to the type of a remote ancestor, and, at the same time,
these nutritive disturbances may lead to disturbances in the formation
of the nerve elements, whereby the child is rendered epileptic
throughout its life. The child is thus born an epileptic, and according
to the nature of the arrest of development from which it suffers, it may
happen that it is incapable of a normal development of the life of
feeling, or it may be incapable of acquiring a normal power of
resistance to anti-social impulses. It then becomes a criminal, and is,
at the same time, an epileptic, with atavistic characteristics. These
features may thus be united at the root, as we may see in every idiot
asylum, and, unfortunately, also in numerous instances in every prison.

By this identification of the born criminal with the moral imbecile
Lombroso has also given occasion to misunderstandings. It was not his
intention to define the criminal with reference to the still
insufficiently studied moral insanity; but, contrariwise, to say that we
are only justified in speaking of moral insanity in cases in which his
(Lombroso’s) “criminal type” is seen to exist. Thus moral “insanity” is
defined by means of criminality, and thus an entirely new and very vivid
conception of moral insanity is rendered possible; for Lombroso’s “moral
insanity” is not an acquired disease suddenly attacking the brain and
suddenly introducing psychical disturbances, but it is the psychological
expression of criminal degeneration. Thus, also, he always contrasts the
moral lunatic with the ordinary lunatic, and a large proportion of his
material is grouped in such a way that this contrast is clearly
exhibited with the aid of all the methods of anthropological and
psychological study. If he goes on to describe moral insanity as a mere
variant of epilepsy, the principal difficulty he has to face is the
contradiction this involves with his atavistic explanation of the
criminal nature. But if, in the appearances of atavistic traits, we see
nothing more than a coordinated element of criminality, this
contradiction disappears, while the marked similarity remains, which
harmonizes, above all, with Samt’s description of epileptoid states; and
the theory is further supported by the fact that the stigmata of
degeneration are commonly present in both types. The extraordinary
frequency of epileptoid types in prisons has also been pointed out by
Sommer, Knecht, Sander, Moeli, and Kirn.

This view of Lombroso’s is, above all, supported by the fact that
criminality and epilepsy are hereditary equivalents—that is to say, that
criminals frequently have epileptic children, and conversely. If,
however, we find no lack of relationships between epilepsy and crime,
these are not explained by the supposition of a simple identity between
the two. What Lombroso has succeeded in proving is that in the wide
group of degenerates who, under certain social conditions, may become
criminals, the epileptics are notably represented. Epileptics, indeed,
unquestionably belong to the less valuable constituents of society.

The importance of the “stigmata” described by Lombroso as indications of
psychical degeneration can no longer be disputed, however difficult it
remains to understand what relationship handle-shaped and projecting
ears, facial asymmetry, dental abnormalities, hypospadias, epispadias,
etc., can have to psychical degeneration. We have, in fact, no better
explanation than the phrase “correlation of growth.” Our present
knowledge of the functions of the brain certainly does not suffice to
elucidate the causal chain by means of which anomalies of the skull are
associated with moral imbecility. But, after all, there is no single
problem of psycho-pathology in which the chain of causation is
completely known to us. However, it should not be difficult to
understand that a brain enclosed in an abnormal skull can never develop
to the full its most complicated function—viz., the coordination of the
voluntary activities for the purposes of a course of conduct adapted to
the conditions of social life.

The term “degeneration” is unquestionably an indefinite one, and remains
to-day incapable of either anatomical or physiological explanation; but
it owes to Lombroso’s researches a definite _practical_ significance,
from the fact that he has proved that the majority of degenerates are
socially inadequate, and, further, that this social inadequacy of
degenerate individuals makes their existence a great danger to society.
The degenerate is often an anti-social being, and society must protect
itself against him.

The importance of these stigmata was not comprehensively understood by
Morel and the other predecessors of Lombroso, in respect either of their
mode of origin, or of their grouping to constitute specific types of
degenerate. Morel merely sketched the outlines, and enumerated a few
important facts about degeneration. One small area only of this enormous
province has as yet been carefully studied—that of criminality. By
Lombroso’s anthropometric and other researches very numerous
demonstrations and statistical classifications of the stigmata of
degeneration have been effected, whilst nothing of the kind has yet been
attempted in respect of other forms of degeneration. As a result of his
work, we are enabled to define the type of the criminal as that form of
degeneration which is characterized morphologically and biologically by
atavistic characters, and psychologically by the deficiency of
altruistic feelings. Even if this type does not afford us a brief or
invariably harmonious signification of crime, still, in a period in
which we no longer believe in the persistence of species, and in which,
even in “good species,” we recognize the tendency to variation, we must
not demand that a degenerative subtype should exhibit constant
characters.




                               CHAPTER IV
   GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS REGARDING LOMBROSO’S LIFE-WORK AS A SOCIAL
               REFORMER, HIS METHODS, AND HIS PHILOSOPHY


Lombroso’s life-work was by no means confined to the highly specialized
field of criminal anthropology. For more than thirty years he was
engaged in the description and elucidation, in a very large number of
monographs and handbooks, of various social ills—crime, prostitution,
alcoholism, pellagra, anarchism, revolts, anti-Semitism. It was as
pathologist and anthropologist that his attention was, in the first
instance, drawn to these matters; and it was his aim to show that these
phenomena—together with many others of which his study was merely
occasional—owe their origin to the typical characteristics of the
anti-social individual.

To this aim, and to his discoveries, under the guidance of this aim, in
the most diverse fields of human experience and knowledge, are due his
peculiar significance in the history of science.

He was an anthropologist, but he studied human beings, not in artificial
isolation, nor in respect merely of individual organs, such as the skull
or the brain—he studied man as he always manifests himself, as the
member of a community, man more or less perfectly adapted to his
environment, and, in so far as he is imperfectly adapted, in conflict
with the hostile forces of that environment. He studied especially the
ill-adapted varieties of mankind, and those which lack the faculty of
adaptation; and in this study he endeavoured to discover “types.”

As a thinker, his nature resembled that of Spinoza. Like Schopenhauer,
Buckle, Quetelet, and Vico, he was one of the most notable advocates of
the determinist conception of society and of history. Looking far beyond
the horizon of a merely economic view of human society, he sought and
found the laws of development of human society rather in the laws of
organic nature.

Undoubtedly many of his ideas and tendencies are in harmony with the
materialist conception of history, and for this reason we find many of
his most distinguished pupils and collaborators in the Marxian camp; but
it was impossible that a man endowed as he was with an intuitive
capacity for the understanding of the conception of the biological
determination of social phenomena should be content to deduce the
actions of individuals and the fate of a nation from the economic
structure of the society in which the individual and national life are
passed.

In his conception of human life, determinism is, indeed, so self-evident
a premise of research, that it is not even discussed, and is hardly so
much as mentioned; in this respect Lombroso stands on the same platform
with the supporters of the materialist conception of history.

But the extent to which, in its detailed application, his biological
determinism leads to different results from those which are the outcome
of the economic determinism of the Marxians will best be shown by a
specific illustration.

This illustration relates to the elucidation of the causes of a tumult
which occurred in Esthonia in the year 1905. The judge before whom the
persons arrested during the suppression of the revolt have been brought
wishes to discover who were the ringleaders; the psychologist wishes to
ascertain to what extent imitation, suggestion, or hypnotic automatism,
has impelled certain ordinarily law-abiding citizens to take part in the
disturbances; the editor of the local Marxian newspaper demonstrates the
causes of the revolt by an analysis of capitalism in general, and of the
economic and social characteristics of the government of the disturbed
section; the reactionary politician will consider that the fault lies in
irreligion, in the disturbing effect of revolutionary agitation, and in
the decline in the authority of a government in which constitutionalism
has replaced absolutism, and whose punitive measures have lost their
former repressive severity. But if Lombroso had been summoned to the
prisons of Liebau, Riga, Dorpat, and Reval, and had been invited to
ascertain the causes of the Letto-Esthonian jacquerie, he would have
examined the meteorological records at the time of the disturbances;
would have inquired carefully regarding the racial origin of the persons
arrested; would have looked for stigmata of degeneration in their
physiognomy and physical characteristics, especially those of the skull;
would have noted how many epileptics, hysterics, lunatics, and
alcoholics there were among them; would have distinguished the habitual
vagrants and those with previous convictions. Among the women arrested
during the jacquerie, he would have asked how many were menstruating at
the time; he would have made a list of the adolescents entirely
dominated by fanatical doctrines; a list of the agents provocateurs; a
list of those instigated by feelings of personal animosity against the
local landed gentry and their retainers. And when all this had been
done, it is very doubtful if among the accused there would then remain
any considerable residuum in whom an advocate of the materialist
conception of history would be able to prove the existence of a purely
economic determination to the offences with which they have been
charged. And even if Lombroso, as is not improbable, should have found
among those arrested or liable to arrest some disciples of Bebel or of
Schönlank, his analysis of their inherited tendencies, their
gynæcological state, their sensibility and reflexes, the shape of their
skulls and the extent of their visual fields, would ultimately bring to
light determinants of their actions quite other than their acquired
orthodox Marxism, which a jurist of the school of Plehve would have
denounced as the _vera causa_, or sufficient reason, for their
participation in the disturbance.

In no other way can we obtain so clear an idea of Lombroso as a
sociologist as from a study of his remarkable book on political
criminals and revolutions.[33] (See above, Chapter III., pp. 64–79.)

Moreover, the manner in which he was led to undertake the writing of
this work is in itself especially characteristic of his methods of
investigation.[34] In the year 1884 there was an exhibition at Turin of
the relics of those who fought for Italian freedom; in this exhibition
were to be seen likenesses of the originators and leaders of this
movement, the men who worked and fought beside Mazzini, Garibaldi, and
Cavour. It was the study of these physiognomies that led Lombroso to
draw his distinction between revolutionists and rioters, and led further
to his general analysis of political criminals. This course is extremely
characteristic of his method of research. Lombroso at all times and in
all places starts from the immediate study of individuals, and proceeds
thence to the formulation of general sociological theories. This method
of procedure differentiates him as an isolated phenomenon among modern
sociologists; but the method was that employed by Goethe and Lavater.

To enable us to characterize more closely Lombroso’s method in
sociology, let us quote from two of our greatest thinkers, Kant and
Goethe. Kant writes: “Thoughts without contents are empty, intuitions
without concepts are blind.” Goethe says (“Zur Morphologie,” p. 2): “To
the man of understanding, to take note of the particular, to observe
with precision, to distinguish each from other, is in a sense that which
arises out of an idea, and also that which leads up to an idea. Such a
one has found his own way home through the labyrinth, without troubling
himself about a clue which might have provided him with a more direct
path; to such a one a piece of metal which has not been passed through
the coining press, and whose value therefore is not apparent, seems a
troublesome possession. He, on the other hand, who stands on higher
ground is apt to despise the individual instance, and to comprise in a
lifedestroying generalization that which can possess life only in
isolation.”

In hardly any province of thought is the contrast thus characterized by
the great morphologist and observer so clearly marked as in the science
of society.

Lombroso has described for us individual human beings to the number of
many thousand, personally examined by himself in respect both of mental
qualities and of bodily characteristics. In addition, we owe to him a
number of personal descriptions of deceased celebrities—“pathographies,”
as they have recently been termed; these comprise the vast material
collected by him in his research into the nature of genius. His work on
“Cardanus” (Girolamo Cardano [Jerome Cardan], natural philosopher and
physician, 1501–1575), published in 1855, when he was still a student,
was the first modern pathography; it contains the germ of Lombroso’s
theory of genius.

The use he is able to make of such individuals for the elucidation of
sociological ideas is dependent upon his own peculiar gifts. He has an
extraordinarily keen insight into whatever is important and
characteristic in an individual; and his grasp of the significance of
the facts thus obtained is due to his remarkable talent for the
discovery of analogies. But if he had been endowed with this talent
alone, a talent possessed also by the German natural philosophers of the
beginning of the nineteenth century, he would not have gone beyond the
formulation of mere hypotheses; but owing to his wealth of coinable
metal (to use Goethe’s simile)—owing, that is to say, to his possession
of a limitless abundance of intuitions peculiar to himself—he was able
to pass beyond the simple formulation of brilliant hypotheses; his
intuitive endowments enabled him to say with Bacon: “Intellectum longius
a rebus non abstrahimus, quam ut rerum imagines et radii (ut in sensu
fit) coire possint.”

Thus, clear perceptions, the utilization of analogy as an organon of
research, a grasp of the important and characteristic elements of
concrete phenomena—these are the means employed by Lombroso in
sociological research. Superadded to these, there arose in him, as a
result of his mental development, a strong conviction of the importance
of enumeration and mensuration, inducing him to accumulate a colossal
mass of data relating to all the subjects investigated by him, to
collect statistical data of anthropometry, demography, economic, moral,
criminal, and social statistics. It was, moreover, a fact of great
importance to the extension of sociological knowledge, that his
collection of data was notably facilitated by brilliantly-grounded and
broadly-based official statistical inquiries instituted in Italy during
the last three decades of the nineteenth century, and also by the
results of comprehensive parliamentary investigations. In the absence of
the great “Inchiesta Agraria” (Agrarian Investigation), his researches
into the causes of pellagra, the widely-diffused and destructive disease
affecting the agricultural labourers and small farmers of Northern and
Central Italy, would hardly have been possible. Equally important for
the anthropometrical researches which, when army surgeon in Calabria in
the year 1862, he initiated upon the mixed population of that region
(then containing no Latin admixture, but composed of Greek, Albanian,
and Sicilio-African elements), was the publication of the recruiting
statistics, by means of which it is comparatively easy to ascertain the
racial composition of the Italian people; whilst to German anthropology
and sociology this indispensable material is almost as inaccessible as
are the Italian plans of mobilization.

Quantitatively considered, the greater part of Lombroso’s life-work has
been devoted to the study of social phenomena bearing upon the fact that
every society contains certain categories of pathological or abnormal
individuals, whose behaviour has a disturbing influence upon the regular
social life. But however interesting and important in relation to the
practical working of State and society may be the social
interconnections thus brought to light, it is certainly not possible
from the knowledge of these alone to deduce a system of sociology; for
example, we do not obtain an adequate knowledge of the remarkable social
phenomenon of prostitution simply by means of the biological study of
the anomalies of a large number of individual prostitutes, and by the
proof that these anomalies are analogous to those whose presence may be
demonstrated in criminal types. For, although this explains the
sociological fact of the existence of a supply of purchaseable sexual
pleasure, it does not explain the existence of the demand for the same
commodity. Lombroso was gradually induced, not only by the critical
powers with which he was so richly endowed (and which led him repeatedly
to the view that most of the phenomena he was investigating were
produced by purely social factors), but, in addition, by the general
tendency of his mind, to show, not merely that the existence of numerous
abnormalities and degenerative varieties of mankind disturbs the life of
society, but, further, that the political and economic development of
the civilized nations gives rise to the appearance of abnormalities
which themselves induce social reactions—and to demonstrate that these
cannot be got rid of by reformatory measures, will not disappear with
the removal of the cause, but lead to permanent biological individual
variations, and, through inheritance, produce anomalies for generations
to come, and in this way give rise to long-enduring social injury or
disturbance.

In the first place it is to him that we owe the knowledge that a given
social and economic order can give rise to transmissible biological
anomalies, and that those who suffer from these anomalies, ill-adapted
for any social and economic order, necessarily exercise a disturbing
influence in society. It was not merely as a positivist that he was led
to this view, but, above all, as an anthropologist.

This knowledge is the most important contribution which Lombroso’s
life-work has given to sociology.

But it does not stand alone.

The greatest of all his services to sociology is that he threw light
upon the reciprocal action between the organic and the social phenomena
of human evolution in respect of a number of important details; but in
doing this he avoided the onesidedness with which Marxism deduces the
fate of the social organism from the economic basis of society, and
avoided also the error of the dreamers who hope to explain the laws of
social existence by regarding society as an organism similar to the
mammalian organism, possessing distinct organs, each with its own
peculiar functions.

Lombroso was very powerfully influenced by Darwinism and by the
evolutionary idea in general, more especially in the form elucidated by
Herbert Spencer in his “First Principles.” As anthropologist, indeed, as
regards the question of the origin of man and man’s place in nature, he
was a forerunner of Darwin[35]; but in respect of the manner in which he
presents the reciprocal action between the organic and the social, he is
quite free from the analogies and homologies which led such men as
Schaeffle and Spencer so widely astray. It was quite inevitable that
Lombroso’s sociological thought should be powerfully stimulated by the
view of his opponents that law is a product of the intellectual, not of
the organic life of mankind, and that therefore it was not nature that
produced criminals, but social and national processes. Thus it became
necessary for him to prove—as in my opinion he succeeded in doing—that
nature makes the criminal, but that society provides the conditions in
which the criminal commits crimes. Nature creates the criminal—and here
Lombroso occupies the same ground as Spinoza and Schopenhauer—inasmuch
as it is through nature’s work that he comes to be born with
predetermined tendencies of character—tendencies which are not altered
after birth, but merely provided with opportunities for their
manifestation. Lombroso identifies this predisposition of character with
the so-called “moral insanity,” and there is no objection to this,
provided we exclude the idea of an acquired illness. Above all, he
regards this predisposition as an arrest at an earlier stage of
development, as an atavism. Lombroso always presupposes the acceptance
of the “fundamental biogenetic law,”[36] and for this reason is led to
expect the occurrence of atavisms as the result of an arrest of
development. Hence, what others speak of as degeneration is to him a
pathological process leading to arrest of development.

The course of his own mental development impelled Lombroso to take a
further step, and to apply his customary methods to the study of the
revolutionary, of the genius, of women, and of “mattoids.” If we now
take a comprehensive view of all this, we find that Lombroso’s principal
contribution to sociology involves the recognition of the following
facts:

Organic nature, through the course of development, and under the
influence of inhibitive or favourable factors, creates in the masses
of individuals to which she gives birth differences and
differentiations—differences of sex, of intellectual and æsthetic
capacity, of character, etc. Thus she gives opportunity for the
origination of certain social phenomena; for society offers a field
abounding in opportunities for the activity of the most extensive
differences of natural endowment. But society provides also selective
factors, and thereby alters the constitution and composition of the
materials furnished by nature in the most manifold variety. Thus, more
or less rapidly, the race undergoes modification. This reciprocal
action is the province in which nature and society meet, and in which
social polity has to receive guidance from anthropology and biology.

I consider that Lombroso has proved by a rigid induction that nature has
endowed man at birth with social sentiments, or—which amounts to the
same thing—with an organic predisposition, out of which, in the course
of individual development, social sentiments arise; and that inheritance
and fœtal development determine whether the individual is in a position
to guard and to further his own interests in the communal life without
prejudice to the interests of the community.

In this connection he has most carefully investigated two special
instances: first, that category of individuals who have needs and
impulses incapable of satisfaction without severe injury to the
interests of the community or to the social standards—criminals and
prostitutes; and secondly, those who consider that the permanent or
future interests of the community cannot be secured without infraction
of the traditional forms of social life, or, perhaps, without disregard
of formal legal prohibitions, without “breaking the old tables,” without
“revaluation of old values”—geniuses and “political criminals.”

He has, however, also demonstrated the fact that in relation to the
rigidity—the formalism—with which the traditions of the social order
have hitherto always been preserved, and will continue to be preserved
in the future, society itself is not as a rule in a position to
distinguish between the criminal and the useful revolutionary. This is
made manifest by the study of the researches undertaken by Lombroso for
his description of the political criminal (1890) and of anarchism
(1849). His examination of the part played in social life by the
political or social genius leads him to formulate a theory regarding the
acceleration of social evolution. Genius brings to pass the revolution
for which the way has been prepared by evolution; the criminal merely
produces revolts.

Thus, in my opinion, we owe to Lombroso the recognition of a fact of
enormous importance—namely, that many disturbances and also many
advances in social life (crime, genius, and revolution) are brought
about, not by economic or other social influences, but by the natural
variability of the species, _homo sapiens_. (Be it noted that Lombroso
contrasts with _homo sapiens_, _homo delinquens_; while he classes the
latter with _homo neanderthalensis_.) To the sociologist it is a matter
of indifference whether certain classes of varieties are termed
degenerative or not. About this point it is for the biologists to come
to an agreement, but in doing so they must not ignore Lombroso’s
anthropological and morphological researches.

No detailed exposition is requisite to show how remote this method of
causal explanation of social phenomena is from the hypothesis that
refers the whole past course of social evolution to the class war, or
regards the class war as the sole factor of importance in the making of
the future. From the standpoint of Lombroso, a moral organization which
would transform its advocates from fighters for the interests of the
community to fighters for the exclusive interests of a class would be
condemned simply as moral insanity.[37] In his work on the anarchists he
expresses himself in this sense (p. 16), here, indeed, with reference to
the governments, which in their political activity are not concerned
exclusively with the interests of a particular class.

He has shown how nature produces socially important differentiations
altogether apart from the co-operation of socially causative factors.
The most important of these differentiations, that between the two
sexes, was described by him exhaustively in the first part of his work
on the female criminal and the prostitute; here, also, he discusses
fully the significance of the natural organization of woman for social
life in relation to motherhood.

His description of the natural organization of woman is only one part of
the important contributions of Lombroso to sociology.

With regard to the natural differentiation of human beings, his work is
summarized in the succeeding paragraphs (I do not think it necessary to
refer here to the numerous passages in his works in which he elaborates,
in greater or less detail, the views I am about to describe; for my
account is based, in addition, more especially upon the direct exchange
of ideas, by word of mouth and by correspondence, during an intimacy of
many years’ duration):

Human beings are differentiated—horizontally, as it were—into tribes and
nations in consequence of original variability, in consequence of
selective œcological factors (soil and climate), and in consequence of
wars, expulsions, and migrations.

This differentiation—greatly influenced by social factors, such as
colonization, miscegenation, etc.—becomes organic, and this organic
differentiation is of very great social importance.

In addition to this, there exists another kind of differentiation,
which, to express it graphically, is vertical in character—viz., the
formation of classes. This depends chiefly upon economic factors, which
are competent to induce organic changes in isolated individuals, but not
to lead to the formation of inheritable types—that is to say, of racial
characteristics. As yet, at any rate, there is no inheritable type of
_homo industrialis_, the proletarian.[38]

In addition to these two varieties of differentiation, there is yet a
third kind, dependent upon purely organic causation, giving rise
continually to new types with a great tendency to inheritance: talent
and genius, the criminal and the saint, the various intermediate stages
of sexual differentiation, which permits of so many nuances in the
intensity of masculinity and femininity in man and woman. These
differences arise altogether independently of social factors—Lombroso
has never suggested the deliberate breeding of supermen—but they give
rise to all-important disturbances and advances in social evolution.

Finally, in Lombroso’s view, the social evils dependent mainly on
economic factors—malnutrition, overwork, unemployment, overcrowding,
town life, vagabondage, accidents, celibacy, venereal diseases,
alcoholism, cachexia—give rise, through the process of reproduction, to
the great army of degenerates, who lack the faculty of adaptation, and
therefore give rise to further disturbances of social life, to
ever-renewed infractions of social order.

No other investigator has done as much as Lombroso for the description
and recognition, by means of exact measurement and numeration, of the
sociologically important, non-ethnic varieties of the human species,
_homo sapiens_. Inspired by the great idea of evolution, he earnestly
endeavoured to elucidate the most obscure secrets of organic life; but
it was precisely by means of his profound knowledge and understanding of
the organic realm that he was safeguarded from attempting to base his
sociological thought upon the superficial analogy between the loose
association of individuals in society and the intimate interconnection
of the cells of a living organism by means of which they are all fused
into a unitary being.

A question which appears to me to deserve consideration is whether
Lombroso was an individualist or a socialist. It is well known that he
exercised a very great influence upon many of the notable advocates of
Italian socialism, both through his personality and by means of his
writings; but I have shown more than once in what has gone before that
he did nothing to support the doctrine of the class war, and Loria was
the only thinker standing anywhere near the Marxian position who can be
said, so far as I can ascertain, to have exercised a considerable
influence upon Lombroso’s thought. Lombroso was never a party man.[39]

Lombroso was a passionate advocate of the rights of the expropriated
classes, always a fearless opponent ever ready for battle, of all
exceptional laws, and a firm believer in democracy; but he was as far
removed from the one-sided advocacy of any kind of class interest as he
was from every apriorist interpretation of social life.

I may, therefore, answer the question by saying that as an intellectual,
and in his criticism of the present social order, Lombroso shows himself
to be an individualist; but, notwithstanding this, his feelings lead him
to favour the socialist view, so that we find in his writings a
sympathetic understanding of the humanist movement no less than of the
process of emancipation in modern social evolution.

We cannot discuss Lombroso as a sociologist without considering also his
ideas and efforts in the field of social reform.

We have seen that he rejects the class war and revolutionary methods as
instruments of social reform, but he is even less sympathetic towards
parliamentary government,[40] and he expects valuable results from those
reforms only that are demanded and brought into effect by the public
opinion of the time, and regarding whose necessity the majority of the
population is firmly convinced.

Inasmuch as Lombroso was led to the study of socio-political questions
chiefly by way of his interest in the world of crime, it will readily be
understood that he was concerned with the construction of the legal
order of society, and especially with criminal law, rather than with the
construction of the economic order of society. For this reason we find
in his writings few original ideas regarding industrial problems and the
emancipation of the working classes. During many years spent in Pavia
and Pesaro he failed to come into contact in any way with capitalism and
the greater industry. First in the industrial city of Turin did these
phenomena force themselves upon his attention; but in his earlier life,
while still quite a young man, he was much occupied with the agrarian
question; and he was one of the most ardent opponents of the traditional
tariff policy of Italy—a country in which the food of the people is very
heavily burdened by excessive protectionist corn duties, enormous land
taxation, and very high octroi (town dues), without any correlative
advantage to the small tenant farmers, peasant proprietors, and
agricultural labourers.

The progress made by Lombroso in the field of social reform, in
consequence of his coming into contact with modern industrialism in the
city of Turin, is most clearly displayed by a comparison of the measures
which he recommended in the year 1890 for the prevention of political
crime, with the contents of the 200 pages which, in the year 1897, in
the third volume of his work on “The Criminal Man,”[41] he devoted to
the prophylaxis and therapy of criminality in general. Two original
ideas are to be found in both these works—viz., definite proposals for
the decentralization of Italian national administration; and proposals
also for the constitution of a kind of popular tribunal, as a
counterpoise to the excessive powers of parliamentary cliques. In
addition, we find in Lombroso’s writings, at quite an early date—and
apparently as an original idea—a suggestion for the establishment of
public labour (employment) bureaus.

I am not aware what Lombroso’s position was as regards the most recent
conception among the methods of social reform—namely, the notion of
“racial hygiene”; nor do I know what he thought of the demand associated
with this notion for the deliberate breeding of supermen as the goal of
the social politics of the future.

Unquestionably he was one of the boldest revaluers of traditional
values; and he was always a convinced advocate of the view that the
inadequate powers of natural selection ought to be supplemented by the
deliberate selection (exclusion from reproduction) of anti-social
individuals. With this end in view he was ever the fearless champion of
the death-penalty, which he designated “estrema selezione.” Above all,
he put before himself as the goal of his life-work the elevation of
criminal law and the application of improved methods for the treatment
of criminals; freed from all metaphysical complexion, these should, he
considered, be numbered among the ultimate aims of social reform. Penal
measures, in his view, are the sole safeguard of social evolution! As
usual, in the case of medical men greatly interested in social reform,
it is difficult to determine in Lombroso’s case where his demands for
social reform end, and where the measures he claims as requirements of
public hygiene begin; speaking generally, whenever he touches on
hygienic questions—as, for instance, in the matter of pellagra—he takes
a comprehensive view, embracing also the preservation and improvement of
the race. The campaign against the most destructive endemic disease of
Italy—pellagra—was the first notable contribution to social reform made
by Lombroso in the years of his early manhood.

But to become a fanatical advocate of racial breeding, in the sense of
Gobineau and Houston Chamberlain, was rendered impossible to him by his
recognition of the multiplicity of the population of Italy. No
anthropologist was more intimately acquainted with the numerous and
fundamentally different types inhabiting this country than was the
discoverer of the mixed Africo-Hellene race of Calabria—the man who
united in his own personality all the highest endowments of the Jewish
spirit, and who from his study of the history of the Romance peoples of
the Mediterranean region had learned to recognize the importance of the
Semitic elements which have been intermingled in this region from the
earliest dawn of history.




                               CHAPTER V
               THE SIGNIFICANCE OF CRIMINAL ANTHROPOLOGY


The true significance of criminal anthropology is a matter with which
few outside Italy have any real acquaintance, and least of all do those
understand it who have most forcibly attacked Lombroso’s methods of work
on account of their alleged defects.

What is, then, the real significance of this doctrine? It is not merely
that it is the starting-point of the reform movement in criminal
procedure, in penal methods, and in the theory of jurisprudence; this,
indeed, accounts for its practical significance. But its importance
reaches far beyond the traditional contest between the prosecuting
counsel and the experts, as to whether, in the case of an individual
accused person, responsibility is diminished or absent. In legal
circles, Lombroso does not play the undesirable rôle of the alienist who
appeals to the prosecutor or to the judge with the assertion: “This man
belongs to me, not to you, for he is a patient, an invalid.” But
Lombroso, in the name of criminal anthropology, appeals to all those
responsible for the enforcement of the criminal law in the following
terms: “You are upon a false road. Neither the accused, nor the accuser,
nor, finally, society at large, will be in the least helped or satisfied
by your methods, by which you study the _crime_ dialectically and
inquisitorially, and endeavour to apportion the punishment to the degree
of blame. Criminal anthropology is not satisfied with demanding, with
Mittelstaedt and Kraepelin, that we should do away with imprisonment,
and abandon any attempt to measure out punishment. Criminal anthropology
declares that the interest of society lies, not with the individual
crime alone, but with the criminal. Every criminal is, in fact, even
before the necessary social reaction has set in against him, or it may
be on his behalf, the object of positive scientific study—_i.e._, of
anthropological study. To ascertain whether his nature has been moulded
by endogenous or by exogenous factors, to determine whether we have to
do with a criminal nature (a born criminal), with an accidental or an
occasional criminal, with an insane or a degenerate criminal, is the
affair solely of positive science, of anthropology, with methods
peculiarly its own.” Thus, when we rightly comprehend the life-work of
Lombroso, we see that it is completely erroneous to assert that the
object of study of criminal anthropology is merely the born criminal,
and that its content is solely the description and elucidation of his
characteristics.

Everything belonging to inherited human nature, to the social structure,
to the economic system and economic history, to justice, to geological,
climatical, and meteorological conditions as determining factors of
human conduct, all determinative cosmic processes—in short, the
reciprocal action between the individual and his environment in the
widest possible sense, and the precise determination of the socially
important characters of the individual—all these are, for Lombroso, the
subject-matter of anthropology; and if a conflict arises between the
individual (thus influenced) and the traditional rights or interests of
society, they are the subject-matter of criminal anthropology. Criminal
anthropology would, and must, exist, even if the idea of responsibility,
and the psychological and legal decisions and traditions based upon that
idea, were non-existent.

A broad-minded general review of the necessity and the causal
connection, in consequence of which inheritance from nearer and more
remote ancestors determines the nature of the individual from his
entrance into the world, and of the inescapable influences which the
world-all as a unity and as a totality, and also through the individual
forces of organized matter and highly organized human society, exercises
on the individual, so that the latter is compelled to act in whatever
manner the operation of these forces determine, whilst all the time he
is under the illusory belief that he desires so to act, and is liable to
be blamed for his actions—this view of the ἓν καὶ πᾶν, of the totality
of the cosmic process, interpermeated throughout by the spirit of life,
and in whose eternal unity and endless manifoldedness the differences
between normal and abnormal, healthy and unhealthy, would seem utterly
without importance—this is the _positive_ view of the world, which from
the very beginning guided Lombroso in his researches. I do not propose
to consider at any length the question whether this view involves
certain dogmatic assumptions. I myself do not think so. In any case, it
is to this view of the world we owe the overwhelming accumulation of
facts which, between the years 1845 and 1860, was effected in the
different fields of natural science. We may also draw attention to the
manner in which the growth of positivism was accompanied by a
development of the industrial arts and by the consequent transformation
of economic life. In a brief Appendix to this work an account is given
of the facts discovered during this period—one characterized by a
temporary realism in politics and by the development of a realistic and
naturalistic art and poetry, and remarkable also for discoveries in
chemistry and physics, with consequent important practical applications.
Thus, for example, the new idea regarding man’s place in Nature
(involving also a new idea of man’s relationship to his social
environment) led to a new artistic method of representing humanity.

In this period, the time of Lombroso’s youth—that of the maturity of
Moleschott, Darwin, R. Mayer, Bunsen, Lyell, Pflüger, and Helmholtz—it
was possible to gain some respect for facts, the enormous accumulation
of which had overwhelmed those who were playing at “natural philosophy”
during the two preceding generations. _Positive_ facts, in an abundance
known to no previous and to no subsequent period in history, were the
foundation of positivism, which then became a principle of investigation
and of explanation. Upon this foundation, and with the aid of this
principle, criminal anthropology was erected. From far-reaching
conceptual analyses, and even from distinct definitions, Lombroso was
preserved, because he accepted as a fact only that which had definitely
been observed, whether as object or as process. His respect for facts
was boundless. It is ridiculous to reproach him with not having
personally observed every single fact of which he makes use. Read his
books, and see the enormous mass of statistical material requisite for
his researches. Wide general conclusions can be reached by no other road
than that of statistics (see above, p. 10).

It must be freely admitted that Lombroso, in his continuous hunger for
material, in his insatiable, unresting desire for new, important, rich,
and rare facts—a greed of the intellect from which nothing was more
remote than mere sensationalism—did not confine his attention to matters
directly observed by himself, nor was he always satisfied with
statistically registered details, but frequently utilized facts of a
singular nature—inadequately warranted facts, which, on the face of the
matter, should have been more strenuously verified. Among these are
certain anecdotes from the lives of celebrated men. To the same category
belongs his credulous acceptance as facts of the processes observed by
him in his “spiritualistic” experiences. This is a matter to which
further reference will be made in a later chapter.

Lombroso’s positivism had one consequence of great importance to
criminal anthropology. “Anthropology,” in his view, embraced all the
facts which, proximately or remotely, determine the being and life of
man. But he had a preference for observing and utilizing
_states_—_i.e._, persistent facts—in place of observing and utilizing
_processes_. Thus it happened that Lombroso’s all-embracing
anthropology, which was far more comprehensive than anthropology as
understood by Virchow, Broca, and Mantegazza, availed itself more
frequently and more thoroughly of anthropometrical and descriptive data
than of the results of experiment, which must first be planned and then
registered, whereas congenital or acquired physical characters are
always ready for observation, and may easily be submitted to serial
study and to statistical treatment. He had little inclination for the
clinical observation of transient, morbid processes, although he did not
disregard this field. In spite of his conviction that mental disorders
are diseases of the brain, he did not regard the brain as something
which man carries about in his skull as he carries his watch in his
pocket; he studied the sick brain of an acute maniac in its organic
connection with the entire life-process, in its dependence upon the
social conditions of life, in its subordination to hereditary
influences—and this inheritance he was accustomed to trace back to the
first beginnings of organic life, regarding man as the final product of
a cosmic causal chain. Thus, to him the permanent documents, the
“stigmata,” in which these resultant effects of remote causality find a
universal and permanent expression, necessarily seemed to him to be of
greater importance than the transient phenomena of clinical observation.
The “types,” the categories of criminals, of geniuses, pseudo-geniuses,
and cretins, must, he considered, be more worthy of observation than the
impulses to speech and movement of the maniac or the katatonic. So,
also, he was fascinated by epilepsy, by the trance-state of
“spiritualistic” mediums, exhibiting in a high degree phenomena always
alike, always recurring in the same manner, whereas the internal
processes in the psyche which eluded objective research attracted his
observation less, although he was one of the first who appreciated at
its true value Fechner’s idea of psycho-physics.

Moreover, the phenomena of experimental physiology and pathology, which
would otherwise have been most interesting to him, were rendered
inaccessible to him in consequence of the elaborate technicalities of
the pathological and clinical laboratories. To this category belong
racial variability, the hereditary influence of social factors upon
social predisposition, the influence of the constitution of the soil, of
climate, and of the seasons, upon the most diverse manifestations of
human activity, and the significance of cosmic factors. The inevitable
result of this was that German biology, and, above all, German
psychiatry, which endeavoured to unriddle everything, either at the
bedside of the living patient in the hospital or in the brain of the
deceased patient in the laboratory, did not understand, and could not
understand, what Lombroso was really driving at with his anthropology.

Now let me attempt to summarize the matter in a few words. Lombroso’s
mind was permeated with the idea of the unity of a universe under the
dominion of strict law, of an invariable uniformity of principle
throughout the world, within which the human being is subjected to laws
identical with those to which crystals, plants, and lower animals are
subordinated; and the understanding of these laws could, he was
convinced, be obtained only by the establishment of positive facts. In
so far as these facts relate to human beings, they comprise in their
totality the science of anthropology.

Certain human actions by which the safety of society is endangered are
no less determined than is the secretion of the urine or the heart’s
beat. It is a stupid blunder to allow the social reaction in response to
such actions to depend upon the blameworthiness of the offender. The
social reaction has one purpose, and one only—the safety of society.
Anthropology, utilizing all the methods at its disposal, will throw
light on the determining causes of anti-social actions, and thus by
anthropology we shall be guided in our choice of means for the
preservation of social security.

That this view forbids us even to moot the idea of “responsibility” is
perfectly obvious.[42] Thus it gives us no basis whatever for
establishing or denying responsibility in the individual instance, or of
determining its extent if it exists. Lombroso provides a scale of
measurement neither for punishment nor for responsibility.




                               CHAPTER VI
            CRIMINAL JURISPRUDENCE—PELLAGRA—AGRARIAN REFORM


Lombroso’s occupation with the problem of criminals and crime extended
far beyond the bounds of criminal anthropology. He was led in this
direction, in part by the need for the establishment of a purely
anthropological characterization of the world of crime, and in part by
his controversies with lawyers, philosophers, and psychiatrists, by
which he was enabled to study other categories of criminal than the
“born criminal”—categories whose existence he had never denied.
Opportunities for investigation in this new field were offered him in
the year 1876, when he removed to Turin—a city in which psychiatric
studies were very actively pursued—by his observations as surgeon to the
Turin prison for the detention of prisoners awaiting trial, and by a
very exhaustive study of penal literature, by which he was led very
speedily to formulate a system for the reform of criminal law and penal
methods. He soon found himself in the position of chief of a school of
criminology, whose influence made itself felt in Parliament, in the
Courts, and in foreign countries. In Italy not long after, in the year
1880, Enrico Ferri, being appointed Professor of Criminal Jurisprudence
in Bologna, gave his powerful support to Lombroso, and there resulted a
rapid succession of works upon the insane criminal, the epileptic
criminal, the criminal by passion, the habitual criminal, and the
occasional criminal, which, in the year 1888, were published as the
second volume of “L’uomo delinquente.” The progress of Lombroso’s ideas
as chief of a “School of Positive Criminology,” from the year 1879, when
he had become firmly established in Turin, to the year 1894, is
indicated by his writings upon punishment, upon the increase of crime in
Italy, upon the proposals for a new code of criminal law, and upon
political crime and the revolution.[43]

In the middle of this fruitful period of twelve years (1884) was
published Ferri’s “Sociologia Criminale,” and about the same time the
reformatory and etiological ideas of Lombroso began to influence the
Italian lawyers; and, notwithstanding the violent protests of the
advocates of the “classical” jurisprudence (Lucchini, Brusa, Gabelli,
and others), the Italian Attorney-General, Baron Garofalo, in the year
1885, displayed his adhesion to the ideas of the Positive School by the
publication of his “Criminologia.”

In Germany there soon followed the celebrity of Mittelstaedt’s book,
“Gegen die Freiheitsstrafe” (“Against Imprisonment”) (Leipzig, 1879).
This was speedily followed by the yet more modern and humane work of
Kraepelin, “Die Abschaffung des Strafmasses” (Stuttgart, 1880), an echo
in many respects of the ideas of Garofalo and Lombroso.

In Kraepelin’s book it is impossible to overlook the influence of
Lombroso’s ideas; and the same influence can be traced also in Von
Liszt’s “Lehrbuch des Deutschen Strafrechts” (“Textbook of German
Criminal Jurisprudence”), of which the first edition was published in
1881; but it could be foreseen that in the psychiatric and legal circles
of Germany, this influence would be indirect and limited. I was myself
convinced of this fact at the time when, in the year 1886, after long
study of the writings of the Italian school, I had resolved to do my
best to diffuse the views of that school in Germany, both verbally and
in writing.

It is not possible to give a detailed account here of the diffusion of
the ideas and methods of the “New School” outside Italy. The
conservatism which inevitably results from a legal education gave rise
to violent opposition on the part of lawyers in Italy, as well as
elsewhere. It was, therefore, above all, necessary to approach the
scientific leaders of the legal circles with the ideas of the “New
School” of criminology. In this respect it was a fact no less impressive
than useful that Lombroso, at the outset of his activity as chief of a
school, published in the year 1881, in the first number of Von Liszt’s
_Zeitschrift für die gesamte Strafwissenschaft_ (_Journal of
Criminology_), an article upon the origin, the essence, and the aims of
the new criminal anthropological school in Italy. In this article he
insists upon the importance of the different causes of criminality, its
anthropological, social, and cosmic factors, upon the aim of repression
as a means of social self-defence, and upon the importance of the
substitutes for punishment (“sostituoi penali”), and the reforms
necessary in the application of punishment. Finally, he deals with the
“positive” character and the inductive methods of the new school.

Professor van Hamel describes this article as “The entrance of the
positive school and of its founder, Lombroso, into the legal world
through its chief portal—_i.e._, the German portal,” which was opened to
him by Von Liszt. Van Hamel’s intention was to indicate the great
importance attached at the outset by lawyers of the first rank to the
introduction of modern criminology into the circle of the legal
sciences. Van Hamel continues in the following terms: “Some years after
this there ensued the foundation of l’Union Internationale de Droit
Pénal, whose statutes have been recognized as providing the basic
principles alike for criminological science and for practical penal
methods.”

Since I estimate at a very high value Lombroso’s importance in relation
to the origin and growth of the present international movement for the
reform of our penal methods, I may be allowed to quote further from the
learned Van Hamel, and to join with him in saying, in this connection:
“Differences in matters of detail affect in no way the uniformity of
principles. Such differences must, indeed, be regarded, not merely as
inevitable, but positively as advantageous. They are inevitable owing to
the differences in human temperament and in national character. They are
advantageous because, owing to their existence, new ideas will find
their way into acceptance in certain forms, when, if they had sought
acceptance in other forms, they would certainly have been rejected.
Differences of detail must never lead us to overlook uniformity of
principle, nor to overlook the common origin of ideas thus differing in
matters of detail. The advocates of the modern penal methods must never
forget that these owe their very existence to the positive school of
Italian thought.”

How did it happen that Lombroso, the anthropologist and psychiatrist,
was led to a criticism of the science of law? He had discovered
intuitively, and believed he could establish inductively, the fact that
there exist “born criminals” or “criminal natures.” His whole course of
mental development—viz., the fact that he was strongly influenced by the
evolutionary theories of Vico and Marzolo, by the English utilitarians,
by the French positivists, and, to some extent also, by the German
materialists of the middle of the nineteenth century—had induced the
conviction that the first object of punishment should be the protection
of society, and the second the improvement of the criminal. It was for
these purposes, he considered, that law had come into existence.

This work, whose aim it is to describe Lombroso, the man and the
investigator, is not the place in which to describe his influence upon
the Italian school of positive penology, or to describe the subsequent
development of that school and its further influence upon the
legislation and penal methods of the civilized nations. Science grows
slowly; the study of the causes of crime demands time and patience,
brings disillusionment, and leads to ever-fresh restatements of the old
problems. The zeal of the reformer finds it difficult to tolerate the
gradual transformation of the old machinery. He wishes at one stroke to
rejuvenate old institutions, to sweep away the old rules. But science,
which has to provide a basis for his efforts, is in its nature patient.
The reformer’s zeal, which has to construct the new edifice, is not
patient. Lombroso was to learn this from personal experience. It was not
possible for him to remain at the standpoint of 1876. And, as reformer,
he himself experienced many changes, especially as a result of his
investigations into the categories of the criminal by passion, the
habitual criminal, the occasional criminal, the criminaloid, the
criminal lunatic, and the epileptic criminal.

He and his school, in their efforts at reform, worked along two main
lines: first, the reform of practical penal methods; and, secondly, the
systematization of the general theory of punishment.

The efforts of this school in relation to the system of punishment and
the reform of penal methods are too well known for it to be needful to
give here even the brief summary for which alone we should have space.
But it is important to point out that the Italians, under Lombroso’s
guidance, resolutely attacked the penal dogmas of the day, which it was
necessary to overthrow before a reform of penal methods in the sense of
social defence could possibly be effected. I shall merely make especial
reference to the powerful influence for good exerted by the positive
school in the direction of the amelioration and humanization of the
horrible function of punishment, which represses so many crimes, but at
the cost of so much suffering and of such numerous errors.

Lombroso gradually came to believe that no useful purpose is effected by
the provision of a great national apparatus intended to improve that
which is unimprovable—_i.e._, the criminal nature; and that society
could not be effectively safeguarded against its permanently dangerous
members—_i.e._, the criminal natures—by means of protective measures of
a transient duration.

Being thoroughly convinced of the existence of criminal natures, and
being, as a utilitarian, hostile to all metaphysics, it was inevitable,
when he came to consider the fundamental aim of the institutions of law
and the State, that he should be led to reject all methods of treating
criminal natures which did not involve their complete removal or
lifelong exclusion from the life of free society. Thus, a large
proportion of his subsequent life was spent in endless controversies
directly against the traditional legal systems and institutions which
did not harmonize with the position he had taken up. He did not seek
these controversies, but he could not and would not attempt to avoid
them. Throughout them, however, he remained the anthropologist, the
collector and investigator in the wide field of the natural history of
mankind, one more interested in studying the origin of the socially
significant varieties of mankind, of which civilized man is one, than in
the description of the differential characters of the races of mankind
now living in various parts of the world—although investigations in this
latter field were by no means repugnant to him.

Lombroso’s great synthetic studies of the natural history of the
criminal came to an end in the year 1902, with the publication of the
German edition of his book upon the Causes and Prevention of Crime. Some
months later appeared a work by Aschaffenburg on Crime and its
Prevention. Even after 1902 Lombroso continued to write upon this
subject, more especially in his periodical devoted to criminal
anthropology; and down to the last year of his life he followed closely
the progress of international research in this field. But it seems to me
that the book of 1902, published at the close of thirty years’ work,
marks the end of his inner development, whilst the Congress for Criminal
Anthropology held in the year 1906, in which he was able to hold a
review of his disciples, co-workers, friends and rivals, gave a fitting
outward conclusion to his career, when he had already passed his
seventieth year.

During the last years, and, above all, during the last months of
Lombroso’s life, a tendency to pessimism became clearly manifest; and
this tendency was, owing to his peculiar organization, closely connected
with a strong bent towards mystic contemplation. But this, in my
opinion, has no bearing whatever upon his crimino-anthropological
researches. His doctrine of the “born criminal” was in no way based upon
a pessimistic foundation. In the field of social reform, including
criminology, he was definitely optimistic. The weak, the sick, and the
degenerate, were regarded by him at once with the objectivity and the
philanthropy of the born physician. It was only in his moral valuation
of the genius, and of the great condottieri and conquistadores of modern
industrial life, that he lacked mildness; indeed, in this latter respect
he rather inclined to severity.

During the period 1879 to 1894 were held the first three International
Congresses of Criminal Anthropology; and the same period was signalized
by numerous other performances of Lombroso, which served for the
propagation, the development, and the application of his ideas. Thus it
happened that he was forced to leave the quiet of the laboratory and the
study; the greatest publicity was gained for the “new school”; and the
investigator who, until the age of one-and-forty, had lived at Pavia,
remote from the world, became involved in unending controversy. By the
best elements of Italian political radicalism Lombroso was now regarded
as leader; and a little later also, during the years 1880 and 1890,
through the support of the slowly developing Marxist School of
Socialism,[44] Lombroso found himself leader in a movement at first
dominated entirely by “intellectuals.” It soon appeared that the retired
and modest investigator was none the less a formidable opponent, whose
voice could make itself heard in all the great questions of public life,
and far beyond the bounds of Italy. I need mention here only the two
great epidemics of anarchism and anti-Semitism, whose flood-tide fell in
this period between 1880 and 1892.

Lombroso was a man of harmonious type, a radical through and through,
one who could not understand that anyone who had once grasped a truth
should be induced to conceal it from social class-considerations. What
those may have to suffer who are ill-adapted for the utterance of
half-truths, and who are averse from compromise, Lombroso had learned
when he came to publish his researches into the cause of pellagra, the
characteristic endemic disease of Northern Italy.


Pellagra is a chronic disease in Northern and Central Italy, which gives
rise to extensive disturbances of digestion and to cutaneous and nervous
disorders, and frequently leads to severe mental disturbance. In
Lombroso’s view it results from the frequent use of damaged maize,
containing toxins, which is consumed by the peasantry of Northern and
Middle Italy in the form of polenta and maize bread, whilst the ground
landlords and their bailiffs live upon the better qualities of maize
produced by the same peasants. I may quote here a passage from the
Preface to my German translation of Lombroso’s book on pellagra:

“This book is the result of researches which I have pursued for
twenty-nine years, often amid very tragic surroundings—tragic for the
reason that from these researches alone I am able to show how human
nature strives against every step towards progress, and regards it
almost as a crime. In Italy it is a secret to no one that my attempt to
show, in opposition to the dominant doctrine, and upon the foundation of
numerous experiments, that pellagra results from intoxication with
damaged maize, aroused so much hostility—I may almost say so much
scandal—in the majority of Italian hygienists and psychiatrists, that in
consequence of this my reputation as a practising physician, as an
investigator, and ultimately also as a teacher, was severely shaken. The
cause of this bitter opposition is perhaps to be found in the greater
cleverness of my opponents, who regarded my energetic advocacy of the
new theory in the light of a personal attack, whereas it was really the
consequence of my too earnest conviction, and of the thought that it was
only in this way that I could hope to save thousands and tens of
thousands from being unnecessarily sacrificed. But a greater cause of
opposition was undoubtedly the hatred of novelty—that deep-rooted
passion common to all humanity. At first, indeed, it seemed to me as if
the truth must always conquer, and conquer quickly, since in this case
it was an obvious truth, one easy to prove, and a very natural one. Nor
do I doubt that ultimately the truth will inevitably prevail, for the
cleverest machinations must in the end recoil from the granite walls
they endeavour to overthrow. But he who believes that this will occur at
once and universally is one who knows little of human nature. Indeed, we
must expect the contrary, for all truths which can only be proved by
means of a long series of experiments or by long-continued observations
rarely fail to encounter an almost insuperable obstacle; and when, in
addition, economic class-interests stand in the way—when _these_
co-operate with the influence of custom, of inheritance, and of natural
human short-sightedness—then woe to the innovator. As Macaulay said, if
the Newtonian law had been opposed to any class-interest, there would
have been no lack of opposition to the doctrine of universal
gravitation.”

It was in the prolonged struggle for his professional life with the
powerful interests he had challenged by the publication of his discovery
of the cause of pellagra that Lombroso became hardened and completely
insensitive to the detraction which is always manifested so freely when
scientific truths are displeasing to the economic or political
powers-that-be.[45]

Thus it was that Lombroso was forced into the arena of public life, and
although he did not become definitely attached to any particular party,
he never ceased to attack half-measures and corruption wherever he
encountered them. When the political corruption under the rule of Crispi
led to the bread-riots at Milan in 1898, the people had an opportunity
of experiencing the use of rifle-fire by the apostles of “order”; and
the dictatorial powers usurped during these weeks were utilized for the
banishment of troublesome political opponents, or to bring about their
disappearance in prison—the methods of South American experts in the
pursuit of political power being freely followed. The name of Lombroso
was upon the list of the proscribed, but they did not dare to lay hand
upon him; just as in Russia five years ago the authorities did not dare
to touch Tolstoy, notwithstanding his direct challenge to the Czar.[46]
Thus it was to the struggles amid which he was precipitated by his
investigations into the nature of pellagra that Lombroso owed the
development of his nature as a fighter, which enabled him to withstand
the most violent scientific and political opponents of his theory of the
“born criminal.” Experiences of life even more bitter than those of
Ibsen’s “Enemy of the People” were met by Lombroso in a spirit of lofty
stoicism.

Owing to his struggle to establish the truth of his views regarding the
cause and prevention of pellagra, Lombroso suffered from a recurrence of
the economic struggles which had embittered his childhood and youth. The
powerful agrarian interests of Lombardy and Venice established a boycott
against Lombroso as a physician amongst the well-to-do middle class and
also in the medical circle of Northern Italy; and as a result of this
his consulting practice, which had hitherto been enormous, and his
resulting comfortable circumstances, and therewith also the means he
needed for the prosecution of his researches, were all swept away.
“Cause and Prevention”—these two words sum up the whole life-work of
this man. Cause and prevention of pellagra, of crime, of anarchism,
prostitution, anti-semitism, political corruption, self-interested
parliamentarism; cause and prevention of lying, hypocrisy, oppression
and exploitation—these were the tasks to which Lombroso devoted his
whole life, and which he prosecuted without rest and without fear, until
at length, after so many struggles, a comprehensive understanding and a
calm, mature wisdom finally led him to recognize the manner in which the
evils affecting society are inseparably associated with wealth and
civilization.

The investigation into the nature of pellagra was of enormous importance
to the Italians, who continued to suffer severely from this evil down to
the present day. We might be justified here in giving a detailed account
of these studies, because it was in them that Lombroso, above all,
showed himself to be a careful experimenter—an experimental pathologist
of the first rank. But from the point of view of this book, the
significance of these investigations and struggles lies, not so much in
the enrichment and development of his knowledge—not so much, that is to
say, in the intellectual sphere—as in the light they throw upon the
man’s intimate life, and upon his character.

In my concluding chapter I shall give some account of the means employed
by those whose interests were affected by Lombroso’s discoveries (in
co-operation with those to whom, as a self-taught man, and one outside
the official and professorial ring, he was an object of dislike) to
annihilate this obnoxious investigator. To the extent of depriving him
of his means of livelihood in Pavia, they were to a large extent
successful. But after a struggle lasting thirty years, Lombroso’s
intoxication theory of pellagra has been finally victorious, and has
been officially recognized by the Italian Government. Moreover, this
theory has been confirmed by the most recent investigations of Tirelli,
Pellizzi, Gosio, and Ferrati, although other toxins of damaged maize are
now considered to be of greater importance than the one to which
Lombroso gave the name of “pellagrozeïn.”


Lombroso’s proposals in the province of agrarian reform were in part of
a purely technical nature, and in part based upon a profound (and in his
day, at least, well-grounded) distrust of the rival factions in the
Italian parliament. At one time he went so far as to believe that
nothing could be done to save the peasants and small farmers from
pellagra, as long as they remained in their North Italian homes; and he
recommended a wholesale emigration to North America.[47]

It is not improbable that Lombroso, notwithstanding the universality of
his talents and his enormous historical acquirements, would, in better
pecuniary circumstances, have confined himself to the study of
comparative philology and to the associated field of psychology. It was
to these studies that he was principally attracted in youth, and his
acquaintance with Marzolo further impelled him in this direction; but
precisely because of his poverty he was compelled to abandon a career of
learning, and to choose a means of earning his bread. For six years he
worked as an army surgeon on the battle-field, in the cholera hospital,
and in a small garrison town; until, finally, in the problems of the
psychical life of the criminal, the lunatic, and the genius, this born
collector of human documents found within the domain of the medical
profession, whose humane duties he fulfilled unweariedly as prison
surgeon, a field in which his intellect could exercise its powers, in
which his character could manifest its strength, and in which his
temperament could display its treasures of modesty, love of humanity,
and inexhaustible patience.

At length, however, this “enemy of the people,” this audacious
formulator of hypotheses, this innovator and rebel, found himself in
advanced life recognized by his fellow-countrymen as a benefactor, by
his colleagues as the pride of their national science, and by his King
as the enlightener of his country.[48]




                              CHAPTER VII
   ENVIRONMENT AND THE THEORIES AS TO THE NATURE OF GENIUS—LOMBROSO’S
                        GENIUS AND PERSONALITY.


I remarked before that almost every one of Lombroso’s books might have
as its title, “The Cause of, and Prevention of ——.” One exception must,
however, be made to this generalization, or perhaps two. The first of
these relates to his book upon “The Man of Genius,”[49] and the second
to his work “Pensiero e meteore,”[50] in which were collected his
researches into the cosmic and telluric influences that determine human
actions.

To speak first of the last-named work, we learn from it, as also from
earlier and later minor writings, that in Lombroso’s opinion it is not
the internal, inborn factors only that exercise an important influence
upon the actions and the social behaviour of human beings. Indeed, to
Lombroso as a determinist we owe a service which distinguishes him from
the great majority of modern determinists. He was bold enough to revive
and to restore to psychology the cosmic determinism of the Pythagoreans.
It was not _within_ the organism alone that he sought the determining
influences of physiological and psychological activity. He looked for
these also _outside_ the organism—in the environment; and his conception
of this environment was the very widest possible (see p. 132). At first,
when still quite a young man, he laid stress, with Buckle, upon the
influence of civilization—that is to say, of the cultural
environment—upon individual phenomena. He saw, indeed, in these
phenomena, when they are of an abnormal character—taking, for example,
the form of insanity, crime, or prostitution—diseases of the social
organism, which become individualized in predisposed or malformed
persons (the theory of degeneration). Subsequently he came to note, and
perhaps to overestimate, the influence of meteorological and cosmic
processes—the influence, that is to say, of the physical environment.
Later still, when he had grasped the entire plan of the edifice of his
life-work, the most important part of that edifice was always the
doctrine of causes and of the environment—understanding always by the
term “environment” all that comes into relation from outside with the
individual and with society, everything competent to determine his
tendencies, his gifts, his capacities, and his actions.

Lombroso ultimately came to regard environment as profoundly important
in determining the production of criminality, as may be seen most
clearly in a passage from the fourth chapter of his work on “The Cause
and Prevention of Crime,” of which I here give a portion. After a
detailed explanation of the distinction between the older civilization,
typified by force, and contemporary civilization, typified by cunning,
and having shown that both these types are manifested in the criminal
career, he goes on to say: “We experience here _de facto_ the parallel
activity of two forms of criminality: atavistic criminality,
characterized by the relapse of abnormally predisposed individuals to
the employment of forcible means in the struggle for existence—means
which our own civilization has normally ceased to use—manslaughter,
robbery with violence, or rape; and evolutionary criminality, which is
just as maleficent in intention, but far more civilized in its means,
for in place of force and violence it employs cunning and artifice.”

The first form of criminality is exhibited only by _a comparatively
small number of unfortunately predisposed individuals_; the second form,
by those who are not sufficiently strong to withstand _the unfavourable
influences of their environment_.

Thus, following in the tracks of Quetelet, and contemporaneously with
Adolf Wagner—the former being the founder of “social physics,” and the
latter the man who demonstrated “the reign of law in the apparently
voluntary actions of human beings”—Lombroso regarded the activity of the
individual as devoid of all true spontaneity. He viewed it in its
dependence upon numerous external and internal factors, in part
belonging to the organization of the individual and in part to his
environment. In accordance with this view, he assigned to the intellect,
to “reason,” a minimal share in the control of actions, in the conduct
of the _ego_. And even in emotion he saw, for the most part, a simple
operation of unconscious processes, subsidiary reactions of the organism
in response to natural forces.

Thus, in his view, the personality of the doer tended to disappear;
individual differences faded away. In his determinism, the idea of the
“type,” of the “group,” of the “class,” preponderates. The average man,
whose type is deformed by the inexorable law of pathological inheritance
(which plays so large a part in all Lombroso’s works), acts under the
mechanical compulsion of his internal disposition and organization; and,
further, as if this alone were insufficient, he is driven by the
external conditions of life, whether those of the physical environment
or those of the social organization. Thus he reduces individual
differences, for the most part, to a few types, in which the
degenerative predispositions almost always manifest themselves in the
form of automatic “epileptic” discharges. This does not mean that he
altogether denied individual classification, but in his teaching all
individuals were contemplated in the light of one and the same
fundamental determinism. From the lowest step of this classification
occupied by the savage atavistic criminal, the series proceeds to the
altitude on which is enthroned the figure of the genius.

This determinism, although not expressly stated, underlies also his
account of genius.

Almost throughout his whole life he was interested in the problem of
genius. We see this from his first important work, published in the year
1855, upon the “Insanity of Cardanus.” It runs through the six Italian
and eight foreign editions of his work on “The Man of Genius.” We see it
also in the last important work published before he died, on “Genius and
Degeneration.”

It is well known that he regarded the analogy between the epileptic
automatic discharge and the inspiration of genius as a proof of the
identity of these two phenomena. Here the indefiniteness of the concepts
“genius” and “epilepsy” is compensated by the importance and abundance
of the facts adduced by him to show that in the essence of genius an
“anomaly” is almost invariably to be recognized—and this not merely in
the peculiarities commonly observed in men of genius in spheres
altogether independent of the direct manifestations of their genius. But
inspiration, the discharge itself, is also cosmically determined. Thus
we understand why it is that, in the last edition of “The Man of
Genius,” the section upon the characteristics of the genius occupies no
more space than does the account of the environing causes of genius, and
occupies barely half the amount of space given to the section upon
genius as manifested in the insane.

However much or however little of these ideas may be found to possess
permanent value, one point of unquestionable importance is Lombroso’s
demand that among the conditions of the work of genius we must study the
personality of the genius himself with all his individual peculiarities.
A glance at the almost interminable series of “pathographies” of
highly-talented persons proves to us how strong an influence Lombroso’s
ideas exercised upon the intellectual world of Germany, and to what an
extent they gave rise to an anthropological method of study of the
nature of the man of genius.

We Germans must see, unless we are blind, the enormous importance in
relation to the work produced by the two most distinguished figures of
our recent intellectual history—Richard Wagner and Friedrich
Nietzsche—of the severe suffering with which both were afflicted. Even
if it be not true that pathology is the root of genius, at any rate,
pathos, not ethos, will persist as the sphere in which mortal man
attains the highest perfection, and the one in which he performs the
greatest deeds. And Lombroso’s own path through life, overburdened as he
was with sorrows, struggles, pains, and deprivations, shows us that, in
default of the forcible over-stimulation which severe suffering induces
in rich and deep natures, the energy of the highest spiritualization is
unable to radiate from the hidden depths of our nature; and yet these
same sorrows and struggles are likely, in those in whom the divine fire
of Prometheus has not glowed from the first, to lead to crime or to
insanity.

In the light of this idea, the life-work of the master, who displayed
the close relationship between these three great manifestations of
suffering humanity, genius, insanity, and crime, will no longer appear
so strange as his isolated and detached ideas appeared to his
contemporaries. And we shall continue to return again and again to his
works, as to an arsenal of means to help us to the understanding of the
highest and of the deepest endowments of mankind.

If we wish to do justice to the life-work of Lombroso, we must not omit
the study of his own personality, to which, therefore, a final glance
may be directed. By his birth and by his own peculiar temperament he
belonged to that Jewish aristocracy to which, as Bismarck pointed out,
Disraeli also belonged. The former well-to-do position and the high
standing of his family were changed greatly for the worse in consequence
of the Austrian domination in Italy. Lombroso was compelled to be not
merely his own teacher, but also his own bread-winner; and when at
length he had attained a good position as a consulting physician and
University Professor, owing to his espousal of the cause of the Italian
peasantry he lost the material advantages of a position which would
otherwise have led him to acquire considerable wealth in the
industrially powerful Northern Italy.

These losses freed him completely from the desire to strive for outward
success, and restored to him the leisure without which he could never
have collected his enormous materials, or carried on his incessant
polemic for clearer ideas, and effected the systematic arrangement of
his material. Thus his life attained a harmonious character such as
rarely belongs to the learned life of a successful physician; and whilst
he remained outwardly unpretending and modest, always ready to help
others both in word and deed, he continued to be the intellectual father
of new and ever new sensational hypotheses. He, “the slave of facts,”
never boasted of his diligence; and although in innumerable
controversies he unweariedly defended his ideas, his zeal was always on
behalf of the ideas themselves, never to gain material advantages.
Lombroso never sought for personal gain from the conceptions of whose
value and importance he was so firmly convinced, and which came to him,
as it were, intuitively. Indeed, his principal strength lay in
intuition, in his ready grasp of the essential. His theories of
intuitive genius lay stress upon certain analogies between intuition and
epileptoid states; and the great reverence paid by him to truth may
possibly have led him at times to underestimate the powerful, although
not always fully conscious, intellectual activity which paves the way to
every happy discovery.

We cannot here attempt to show the extent and importance of Lombroso’s
contributions to Italian culture outside the domain of anthropological
researches. From his house in Turin, and from the circle of thinkers,
officials and artists who assembled there, there was diffused a powerful
influence, and at times the very consciousness of Italy seemed to be
centred here at work. And, unceasingly, a manifold receptivity and
activity found the unity and the energy requisite for their concentrated
effects in the fiery soul in whose ardour the most heterogeneous
elements were fused, and whose spirit lives on in his successors and
disciples—

                 “cursores qui vitai lampada tradunt.”




                               APPENDIX A
                  LOMBROSO’S SPIRITUALISTIC RESEARCHES


During the correction of the previous chapters I have read Lombroso’s
final and posthumous work, and I feel that it is expedient to append a
brief account of Lombroso’s dealings with the spiritualists, which were,
indeed, characteristic of his peculiar personality, but are without
significance in relation to his more important investigations—those
which interest us and will interest posterity.

It was about the year 1890 that throughout Europe the investigations of
psychiatrists, neurologists, and psychologists into the subject of
hypnotism attained their acme. During the years 1885 to 1890 there was
an unceasing current of hypnotic experiments. Almost every clinic had
its own mediums; and soon some of these mediums, of whom not a few
attended more than one clinic, produced occult phenomena, such as the
action of medicaments at a distance (Bourru and others), the polarizing
effect of magnets, thought-transference, and thought-reading, in
addition to the phenomena of the hypnotic sleep and hypnotic suggestion.
Not infrequently such séances as these, instituted by serious men of
science, closely resembled the phenomena of the “animal magnetism” of
the first third of the nineteenth century and the séances of the
spiritualists during the middle third of the century. Men who,
unquestionably, were well experienced in observation and in rigorous
experiment—such men as Charcot, Richet, Preyer, Forel, and
Zöllner—believed in the reality of the occult phenomena which gradually
made their appearance in the hypnotic mediums.

In the year 1888, Lombroso published a series of exhaustive experiments,
dealing more especially with the limits of suggestion in the waking
state, and the influence of a permanent magnet upon suggested
sensations. It was most remarkable that this positivist investigator, a
man whose habit it had been to confine himself to objective
investigation, and to consider subjective phenomena as entirely
subsidiary and to deal with them with extreme caution, should concern
himself with matters so little accessible to objective observation as
the reaction to hypnotic procedures and the examination of suggested
ideas in hypnotized and hysterical subjects, and while engaged in this
path of study to associate, ultimately, more and more intimately with
thought-readers, spiritualists, and other thaumaturgists.

It was, indeed, a result of his overwhelming conviction, at once of the
objectivity and of the materiality of the performances of hypnotized
persons, associated with a reluctance to accept the explanation of such
phenomena by purely subjective factors—viz., their explanation solely by
means of ideas—that led Lombroso to the credulous assumption that there
existed a peculiar material condition of the brain-substance as the
cause of all these categories of phenomena.

The fact that the mediums themselves either coquetted in a most
equivocal manner with the possibility of associated immaterial
processes, or else introduced the absurd doctrines of spiritualism for
the explanation of the phenomena occurring at their séances, did not
discourage Lombroso from the continually renewed study of
thought-readers, calculating wonders, telepathists, and teleurgists
(persons who claimed the power of giving rise to mechanical changes in
remote objects), for he believed in the genuineness of different forms
of “trance”; and his honourable capacity for belief, his disinclination
to explain anything that was new as the result of deception merely
because it was an unusual experience, frequently delivered him over to
the devices of cheats.

I can explain here that, from my own experience, his most important
medium, Eusapia Palladino, whom, in April, 1894, in association with
Lombroso, Enrico Ferri, the psychologist Luigi Ferri, the physiologist
Richet, the anthropologist Sergi, and the painter Siemiradzki, I
observed in several séances, was, indeed, a “miracle”—_i.e._, a miracle
of adroitness, false bonhomie, well-simulated candour, naïveté, and
artistic command of all the symptoms of hystero-epilepsy. In Rome, where
the séances were held, she had at her disposal certain extremely adroit
male mediums, who were associated in all her tricks. These mediums
behaved irreproachably. During the séances, in consequence of emotional
excitement and superstitious terror, they suffered publicly from
hysterical paroxysms; and they were clever enough to charm Siemiradzki
by arranging that “from the fourth dimension” a sheet of writing-paper
should fall into his lap, upon which was inscribed in isolated Polish
words[51] a prophecy of the speedy restoration of the kingdom of Poland.
I took an exact transcript of this manifestation, and must repeat to-day
what I said sixteen years ago, that if (as the mediums asserted, though
I do not myself believe it) the spirit of Kosciuszko really wrote these
hopeful words—instead of prophesying _finis Poloniæ_—then “in the fourth
dimension” the spelling and grammar of the Polish language must have
been very badly preserved. (Charles Dickens made the same observation in
respect to English spelling as exhibited by “spirits.”)

At that time it was my impression that in these séances Lombroso’s
interest was in the spiritualists, not in the “spirits,” and, in the
next place, in the abnormal trance-state of the mediums. This was
undoubtedly so at that time; but his subsequent publications have shown
that at a later date he went much further than this, and ascribed to the
brain-substance the faculty of exercising a powerful influence beyond
the periphery of the body (although, according to the dominant and still
unshaken opinion, the function of the brain-substance is subject to the
law of isolated nervous conduction). For example, in the _Annales des
Sciences Psychiques_, 1892, p. 146 _et seq._, Lombroso wrote as follows:

“Not one of these facts (which we must admit to be facts, since we
cannot deny that which we have seen with our own eyes) is of a nature to
render it necessary to suppose for its explanation the existence of a
world different from that admitted by neuropathologists to exist. I see
nothing inadmissible in the supposition that in hysterical and
hypnotized persons the stimulation of certain centres, which become
powerful owing to the paralyzing of all the others, and thus give rise
to a transposition and transmission of psychical forces, may also result
in a transformation into luminous or motor force. In this way we can
understand how the force, which I will call cortical or cerebral, of a
medium can, for example, raise a table from the floor, pluck someone by
the beard, strike him or caress him—very frequent phenomena in these
séances. In certain conditions, which are very rare, the cerebral
movement which we call thought is transmitted to distance, sometimes
small, sometimes very considerable. Now, in the same way in which this
force is transmitted, it may also become transformed, and the psychic
force may manifest itself as a motor force. Do we not see the magnet
give rise to a deflection of the compass-needle without any visible
intermediary?”

We must not without further consideration dismiss this idea as absurd,
because a very simple experiment suffices to show that the well-known
and continuous heat-radiation from the living body—that is to say, the
dispersal from the body of ultra-red etheric undulations—undergoes
notable and easily measurable changes, in association with every change
in the intellectual or emotional equilibrium, just as the arterial
pulse, which changes under the influence of emotional disturbance, gives
rise to varying oscillations in the air. But we do not possess
sense-organs adequate to detect either these atmospheric or these
etheric undulations. We were unable to establish their existence until
physiology had given us Mosso’s plethysmograph and Zamboni’s dry
battery.

There was a very powerful subjective reason why Lombroso did not apply a
strenuous criticism to the occult phenomena of Eusapia, of Pickmann,
etc. His own most important ideas had at first encountered doubt from
the learned world, and in many cases contempt and ridicule. For this
reason he was free from the tendency, traditional in academic circles,
towards an extreme reserve in relation to completely new facts and
theories contrary to the dominant views, and therefore dangerous to
those advocating them. On the contrary, to doubt the good faith of those
who were producing the new hypnotic and other mediumistic phenomena was
not only contrary to his natural disposition, incapable of any pettiness
and indisposed to mistrust anything that was unusual, but it also
conflicted with the tendencies resulting from his own personal
experiences.

In the year 1872, when he brought before the Medical Academy of Milan
his experiments and investigations regarding the etiology of pellagra
through the consumption of spoilt maize, he was accused by the surgeon
Porta, Dean of the medical faculty of Pavia and an advocate of the
interests of the great landlords, of having falsified his experiments,
and of having artificially induced lesions in the animals he
experimented on—the result being that the whole matter was turned to
ridicule, and he and his pellagrous chickens were made fun of at the
next carnival.

Lombroso was accustomed to quote a verse from Dante, “Io non piangea, si
dentro impetrai” (“I did not weep, but my heart was turned to stone”),
in order to explain the impression left upon him by this experience. The
controversies about pellagra continued for about thirty years, until at
length, in the year 1902, official recognition was given to his theory
by the legislation carried in that year for the prevention of the
disease.[52] The _déclassé_, the Jew, the self-taught man, could not be
allowed to take an equal rank in the university life amongst the sons of
the well-to-do classes of Northern Italy, so closely allied with the
landed interest; and for this reason the most distinguished and
influential member of the academic circle described his laborious and
tedious researches as falsified. It was this experience which made it
psychologically impossible for him, when he came to study occult
phenomena, to take into consideration the possibility of fraud.

This helps us to understand how he came to enter upon these
investigations, and how it was that he allowed himself in many cases to
be deceived regarding the reality of the processes under observation.

But it was precisely his unmitigated positivism which led him _a priori_
to regard many things as possible and open to discussion, from which
others in their specialist narrowness would have (doubtless in this
instance more wisely) turned away. In the year 1888, Lombroso believed
himself to have proved the influence of the magnet upon suggested colour
sensations. With this begins the series of his publications upon occult
phenomena (“Studi sull’ ipnotismo e sulla credulità,” _Archivio di
psichiatria_, 1888, ix., pp. 528–546). From these effects of the magnet
(whose subjective causation he left an open question) he drew the
following inference: “The magnet is an object known to have effect
within the physical sphere. If a new result is seen to follow its
application, this must also be of a physical character, and cannot be of
any other. Thus in the hypnotized person, whose cerebral molecules are
in a condition different from that in the brain of the non-hypnotized
person, the magnet has given rise to a rearrangement of the cerebral
molecules. If the observed effect is purely subjective, we must conclude
that the subjective phenomena are dependent upon the physical
conditions, and that the rearrangement of the cerebral molecules gives
rise to the phenomenon of so-called polarization.”

Psychologically allied with this is Lombroso’s utterance regarding
muscle-reading, to the effect that if an act of the will is effective at
a distance, this proves that the will, far from being immaterial, is a
phenomenon of movement, and is, therefore, a manifestation of matter.
Indeed, he expresses his astonishment that thought-transference is so
rarely observed: “May it be that in the forms of energy known under the
names of electricity, magnetism, heat, light, and sound, there is
produced the same thing as in thought; and if one admits this, may it
not be that thought is simply a phenomenon of movement.”[53]

At the time when these first experimental studies were published,
Lombroso was, however, still sceptical regarding spiritualistic
phenomena, as is proved by the following utterance, which I publish here
in full because in it we can already detect the psychological tendencies
which ultimately led him to capitulate—_i.e._, to recognize the
existence of telepathic phenomena at séances: “Every epoch is unripe for
the discoveries which have had few precursors; and if it is unripe it is
also unadapted to perceive its own incapacity. The repetition of the
same discovery prepares the brain to make it its own, to accept it, and
finds minds gradually becoming less hostile to its acceptance. For
nearly twenty years the discoverer of the cause of pellagra was regarded
throughout Italy as mad; to-day the academic world still laughs at
criminal anthropology, at hypnotism, at homeopathy. Who knows whether
we, who to-day laugh at spiritualism, may not also be in error? Thanks
to the misoneism which lies concealed in us all, we are, as it were,
hypnotized against the new ideas, incapable of understanding that we are
in error, and like many insane persons, whilst the darkness hides the
truth from us, we laugh at those who stand in the light” (“L’ influenza
della civiltà e dell’ occasione sui genio,” _Fanfulla della Domenica_,
1883, Nr. 29).

In the year 1891, when Lombroso, in association with Bianchi and
Tamburini, had held the first sittings with Eusapia Palladino, he wrote
in a letter to Dr. Ciolfi: “I am ashamed and sorrowful that with so much
obstinacy I have contested the possibility of the so-called
spiritualistic facts. I say the _facts_, for I am inclined to reject the
spiritualistic _theory_; but the facts exist, and as regards facts I
glory in saying that I am their slave.”

There soon followed other sittings, most of them with Eusapia as medium,
conducted by Von Aksakow and Du Prel. (To this period belong all the
sittings in which I myself took part with Siemiradzki, and in which
there took place Lombroso’s thorough investigation of the trance-state
of both the male mediums mentioned above.) From 1896 onwards, after
observations made on the “thought reader” Pickmann, Lombroso published
in his _Archivio di psichiatria_ a perpetual record of his mediumistic
experiments.

His last work of all, published after his death (“Ricerche sui fenomeni
ipnotisi e spiritici,” pp. 320, Turin, Unione Editrice, 1910), might be
regarded by the credulous as a “Greeting from the Spirit-World.” We,
however, who renounce this “Spirit-World,” may well content ourselves
with the undying intellectual achievements of the deceased investigator;
to our enemies we freely give the Lombroso of senile decay, for the
Lombroso of youth, for ever young, is ours.




                               APPENDIX B
                        LIST OF BOOKS CONSULTED


PAOLA E GINA LOMBROSO: Cesare Lombroso, Appunti sulla vita. Turin, 1906.

C. LOMBROSO: Writings, 1854–1909.

C. LOMBROSO: Archivio di psichiatria, Scienze penali ed Antropologia
criminale. Turin, 1880–1909.

ENRICO FERRI: Sociologia criminale. Turin, 1902.

FRASSATI: La nuova scuola di diritto penale. Turin, 1891.

M. CECCAREL: Della vita e degli scritti di Paolo Marzolo. Treviso, 1870.

L. BIANCHI: L’ Opera di Cesare Lombroso nella scienza e nolle sue
applicazioni. Turin, 1906.

MARIO CARRARA: Cesare Lombroso (Annuaria della R. Università di Torino,
1909–1910).

H. KURELLA: Cesare Lombroso und die Naturgeschichte des Verbrechers.
Hamburg, 1892.

H. KURELLA: Naturgeschichte des Verbrechers. Stuttgart, 1893.

H. KURELLA: Die Grenzen der Zurechnungsfähigkeit und die
Kriminal-Anthropologie. Halle a S., 1903.

H. KURELLA: Die soziologische Forschung und Cesare Lombroso, Monatsschr.
f. Kriminalpsychologie und Strafrechtsreform, 1906. S. 308 u. ff.

G. ASCHAFFENBURG: Das Verbrechen und seine Bekämpfung. Heidelberg, 1903.

R. SOMMER: Kriminal-psychologie und straftrechtliche Psychopathologie.
Leipzig, 1904.




                               APPENDIX C
              FACTS AND DOCUMENTS OF POSITIVISM, 1841–1865


                      PREPARATORY WORK, 1841–1850

  1841. JOULE: Thermogenic Effects of the Electric Current.

        HERSCHEL: Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences.

        LIST: Das nationale System der politischen Ökonomie.

  1842. R. MAYER: Erhaltung der Energie.

        R. WAGNER: Handwörterbuch der Physiologie.

        A. COMTE: Cours de philosophie positive.

        L. FEUERBACH: Wesen des Christentums.

  1843. J. S. MILL: Inductive Logic.

        MATTEUCCI: Discovery of the Nerve-Current.

  1844. FARADAY: Electrical Conduction and the Nature of Matter.

  1845. _Discovery of the Electrical Incandescent Lamp._

  1846. W. WEBER: Electrodynamic Measurements.

        _Discovery of Anæsthesia by Ether._

  1847. HELMHOLTZ: Die Erhaltung der Kraft (Conservation of Energy).

        _Discovery of Anæsthesia by Chloroform._

  1848. QUETELET: Du système social.

        DUBOIS-REYMOND: Animal Electricity.

        _Discovery of Gold in California._

  1849. _Discoveries of Bacillus of Anthrax and of Aniline Dyes._

  1850. HERBERT SPENCER: Social Statics (Identity of Laws of Organic and
          Social Evolution).



                  DOMINANCE OF POSITIVISM, 1851–1860.

  1851–1860. _Mileage of European Railway Systems increases by 250 per
                                 cent._

  1851. LYELL: Principles of Geology.

        LOMBROSO: Concerning Marzolo’s “Monumenti storici rivelati dall’
          analisi della parola.”

        SCHOPENHAUER: Parerga und Paralipomena.

        _Discovery of the Neanderthal Skull and Other Evidences of the
          Antiquity of Man._

        HELMHOLTZ: Ophthalmoscope.

        RUHMKORFF: Induction Coil.

        RICHARD WAGNER: Oper und Drama.

        MILLET: Le Semeur; und COURBET: Das Begräbnis von Ornans.

  1852. MOLESCHOTT: Kreislauf des Lebens.

  1855. PFLÜGER: Electrotonus.

        NAEGELI: Investigations Regarding Vegetable Physiology.

        BÜCHNER: Kraft und Stoff (Force and Matter).

        FARADAY: Magnetic Philosophy.

        _Discovery of Hot-air Engine, of Bessemer Steel, and of
          Aniline-violet._

        WALT WHITMAN: Leaves of Grass.

  1856. _Discovery of the Annular Kiln, of the Regenerative Gas Furnace,
          and of the Mercurial Air-pump._

        J. VON LIEBIG: Theory and Practice of Agriculture.

        LE PLAY: Les Ouvriers Européens.


           THE FOUR CLASSICAL YEARS OF POSITIVISM, 1857–1860.

  1857. BUNSEN: Exact Methods for the Analysis of Gases.

        MOREL: Traité des Dégénérescences.

        MARX: Materialist Conception of History.

        BUCKLE: History of Civilization.

        TOCQUEVILLE: La Révolution et l’Ancien Régime.

        FLAUBERT: Madame Bovary.

  1858. VIRCHOW: Cellularpathologie.

        M. SCHIFF: Lehrbuch der Physiologie.

  1859. KIRCHHOFF und BUNSEN: Spectrum Analysis.

        DARWIN: Origin of Species.

        J. S. MILL: On Liberty.

        _Discovery of the Telephone, the Ice Machine, and the Azo
          Colouring Matters._

  1860. FECHNER: Psyohophysik.

        BOUCHER DE PERTHES: De l’Homme Antédiluvien et de ses Œuvres.

        BOUCHER DE PERTHES: Discovery of the Gas Engine.

        SEMPER: Der Stil.


                       AFTER-EFFECTS, 1861–1865.

  1861. BACHOFEN: Das Mutterrecht (Matriarchy).

        GRIESINGER: Pathology of Mental Disorders.

        SCHLEICHER: Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen.

        MANET: Frühstück im Grünen.

        DOSTOIEFFSKY: Raskolnikow.

        FONTANE: Wanderungen durch die Mark.

        _Liberation of Serfs in Russia._

  1862. HERBERT SPENCER: First Principles.

        IBSEN: The Comedy of Love.

        TOURGUENEFF: Fathers and Sons.

        _Construction of Pacific Railway._

        _Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation._

        _Bismarck’s Realpolitik (Blood and Iron)._

  1863. HUXLEY: Man’s Place in Nature.

        LYELL: Antiquity of Man.

        HUGGINS: Spectra of Fixed Stars and Nebulæ.

        BROCA: Sur le Siège, le Diagnostic et la Nature de l’Aphémie.

        PASTEUR: Theory of Fermentation.

        RENAN: Vie de Jésus.

        WUNDT: Vorlesungen über die Menschen und Tierseele.

  1864. LOMBROSO: Genio e follia.

        A. WAGNER: The Reign of Law in the Apparently Voluntary Actions
          of Human Beings.

        LASSALLE: Bastiat-Schultze.

        DE GONCOURT: Renée Mauperin.

        ZOLA: Confession de Claude.

        TOLSTOY: War and Peace.

  1865. MEYNERT: Anatomy of the Cerebral Cortex and its Relations to the
          Sensory Surface of the Body.

        LUBBOCK: Prehistoric Times.

        LOMBROSO: Aliénations Mentales Étudiées par la Méthode
          Expérimentale.

        HAECKEL: Generelle Morphologie.

        VON LIEBIG: Induktion und Deduktion.

        CANNIZZARO: L’ emancipazione della ragione.

        J. S. MILL: Comte and Positivism.

        TAINE: Le Positivisme Anglais.

        _Extension of Democracy in England by Russell and Gladstone._

        _Martin Steel, Gas-engines, Influence Machines._




                                 INDEX


                                   A.

 Adaptation, deficient, of degenerates, 123

 Africo-Hellene race of Calabria, 129

 “Agrarian Investigation,” 114

 Agrarian problems, Lombroso, 127

 Agrarian reform, 156, 157

 Aksakow, Von, 176

 Alcoholism and criminality, 95

 Altruism deficient in criminal types, 105

 Analogies, Lombroso’s talent for the discovery of, 112

 Anarchism, 149

 Animal magnetism, 168

 Anomalous character of genius, 162, 163

 Anthropology, earlier and recent significations of the term, 10 note
   subject-matter of, 132
   Lombroso’s conception of, 135, 137, 138
   according to Virchow, Broca, and Mantegazza, 135
   criminal, 18–54. See also separate organs, as brain, skull, etc.
     tabular statement of primatoid varieties, 27–29
     fundamental notion of, 42
     physiognomy, 47–53
     tabular statement of distinctive anatomical characters, indicating
        abnormal congenital predisposition in more than 800 non-insane
        criminals, 54
     significance of, 130–138
   Congress for, 147, 148
   of women. See “Woman as Criminal”

 Anti-semitism, 149

 Anti-social tendencies of degenerates, 104, 105
   types, 119, 123
     need for segregation of, 146

 Ape-like characters. See Primatoid varieties

 Apportionment of punishment, 131

 Argot. See Jargon

 Aristocracy, Jewish, 164, 165

 Arrest of development in criminals. See also Atavism, 46

 “Art for art’s sake,” in criminals, 89

 Art, naturalism in, 133

 Artistic method, new, the fruit of positivism, 134

 Arts, industrial, and positivism, 133

 Aschaffenburg, 60 note, 147, 177

 Asymmetry, facial, 104

 Atavism, 19–25, 45–48, 59, 60, 95, 96, 101, 105, 118, 160 162
   and crime. See Atavism and prostitution, 59, 60

 Austrian dominion in Italy, 165


                                   B.

 Bachofen, 180

 Bacon, Francis, 113

 Baer, A., 24 note

 Bagehot, Walter, quoted, 66 note

 Battery, Zamboni’s dry, 172

 Bebel, 110

 Beltrani-Scalia, 80

 Benedikt, 94

 Bianchi, 175, 177

 Biogenetic law, the fundamental, 118

 Biological determination of social phenomena, 107 _et seq._
   determinism. See also Determinism
     of Lombroso, 161, 162

 Bismarck, 165

 Bistolfi, 82

 Blameworthiness, 131

 Books consulted, list of, 177

 Born criminal. See Criminal, born

 Born criminals form a degenerative subtype, 105

 Boucher de Perthes, 180

 Bourgeois criminality, 87

 Brain in criminals, 38–45

 Bread-riots at Milan, 1898, 153

 Breeding, racial improvement by, 129, 146

 Broca, 135, 180

 Bruant, 91

 Brusa, 141

 Büchner, 8, 179

 Buckle, 107

 Bunsen, 134, 179, 180

 Burdach, 7


                                   C.

 Calabria, Lombroso’s work in, 114
   races of, 114, 129

 Camorra, the, 91

 Cannizzaro, 181

 Capital punishment, Lombroso favours, 128

 Cardan, Jerome, Lombroso’s work on, 112, 162

 Carrara, 81, 177

 Cause and prevention, 158

 Causes and prevention of crime, 147

 Ceccarel, 177

 Cerebrogenous characters, 27–29, 54

 Chamberlain, Houston, 129

 Characteristics common to criminals and epileptics, 98, 99

 Characters, cerebrogenous, primatoid, etc. See under Adjectival term

 Charcot, 168

 Charuigi, 7

 Cheats, 169

 Child criminals, 97

 Ciolfi, 175

 Class-interests, power of, in preventing spread of truth, 151, 152

 Class struggle. See Class war

 Class war, the, and social evolution, 121, 122, 124, 125

 Classes, differentiation by and through, 121

 Clinical observation, 136

 Comte, vi, 178

 Congenital. See Inheritance

 Congress for Criminal Anthropology, 147, 148

 Conventional element in crime, 90

 Correlation of growth, 104

 Cosmic causality, 136
   determinism, 69, 132–134
   influences, 159

 Cranio-facial developments, ratios of, 31, 34

 Craniology. See Skull

 Craniometry. See Skull

 Crest, internal frontal, 28, 29
   temporal, 29

 Crime. See also Criminal
   and insanity, 84, 85
   and imbecility, 84, 85
   and disease, 97
   causes and prevention of, 147
   related to genius and to insanity, 164
   political. See Political crime

 Criminal. See also Anthropology, criminal
   accidental, 131
   anthropology. See also Anthropology, criminal
     Congress for, 147, 148
     positive foundation of, 134
     significance of, 130–138
     subject-matter of, 132
   born, 100, 131. See also Criminal type

 Criminal born, the insensibility of, 88, 89
   degenerate, 131
   epileptic, 140, 145
   habitual, 140, 145
   insane, 131, 140, 145
   jargon of. See Jargon
   jurisprudence. 139–149

 “Criminal Man, the,” 140

 Criminal nature, 131. See also Criminal type and Criminal, born
     and epilepsy, 98–103
   occasional, 131, 140, 145
   by passion, 140, 145
   political, 119, 120. See also Political criminal
   psychology. 79–105. See also Psychology, criminal
     significance of term, 93 note
   tendencies, inheritance of, 96, 97, 101
   type, the, 102
     criticism of idea of, 55
     meaning and limitations of the doctrine, 50
     physiognomy of, 51
   types, female, comparatively rare, 61–63
     lack “mother-sense,” 63
   woman. See “Woman as Criminal”

 Criminality, atavistic, 160
   by passion, 100
   evolutionary, 160
   influence of environment on, 160

 Criminaloid, the, 64, 145

 Criminals, cruelty of, 84–86
   recklessness of, 84, 85
   responsibility of, 85, 86
   economic status of, 86, 87

 Criminology, school of positive, 140

 Crispi, 153

 Cro-Magnon, prehistoric man of, 33

 Crossing of races, and its effect on political evolution, 74

 Cruelty in women, 58
   of criminals, 84–86

 Cunning and force, 160


                                   D.

 Dante, 173

 Darwin, 33, 47, 117, 134, 180

 Darwin’s “Descent of Man,” 33, 117

 Darwinian tipped ear, 47

 Darwinism. See Evolution

 Death, indifference to, in criminals, 88, note
   penalty, Lombroso favours, 128

 Decentralization of Government, Lombroso favours, 127

 Degenerate, the, an anti-social being, 104, 105

 Degenerates, 123

 Degeneration, 15 _et seq._, 103–105, 159, 160, 162
   and crime, 103–105
   genius and, 162
   practical significance of term, 104
   stigmata of, 103 105
   theory of, 160

 De Goncourt, 180

 Democracy, Lombroso’s faith in, 125

 Dental abnormalities, 104

 De Perthes, Boucher, 180

 “Descent of Man” (Darwin’s), 33, 117

 Despine, 13, 14

 Determinism, 69, 107 _et seq._, 116, 120, 121, 123, 132–134, 138, 161,
    162
   biological, of Lombroso, 107, 116, 120, 121, 161, 162
   cosmic, 69, 132–134
   economic, of Marx, 116, 123

 Development, moral. See Moral development

 Diagnosis, differential. See Differential diagnosis

 Dickens, Charles, quoted, 170

 Differences, individual, comparatively unimportant, 161

 Differential diagnosis of varieties of criminal, 83–91

 Differentiation in human species, 122
   sexual, 57, 58, 121
     Lombroso’s law of, 57

 Differentiation, sexual, in savages as compared with civilized races,
    58

 Discovery, fruitful period of, in association with a positivist view of
    the universe, 133

 Disease and crime, 97

 Disraeli, 165

 Documents of positivism, 178–181

 Donna delinquente, la. See “Woman as Criminal”

 Dostoieffsky, 180

 Dubois-Reymond, 178

 Du Prel, 176


                                   E.

 Ear, Darwinian tipped, 47
   handle-shaped and projecting, 104
   Morel’s, 48
   peculiarities of, in criminals, 47, 48

 Earpoint of Darwin, 47

 Economic determinism. See Determinism
   factors of crime, 87
   motive, supremacy of, 151, 152
   status in relation to crime, 86, 87

 Ellis, Havelock, vi, 58, note
   quoted, 67 note

 Environment, 132, 159, 160
   and crime, 160
   and individual, 132 _et seq._

 Epilepsy, 136
   chronic, 100
   and criminality, 98–103
   and genius, 162
   as an hereditary equivalent
   of criminality, 103
   larval, 100
   Lombroso’s conception of, 99

 Epileptic discharges, 161

 Epileptoid states (Griesinger), 100
   types common in prisons, 103

 Epispadias, 104

 Equanimity of criminals sentenced to death, 88 note

 Equivalents, hereditary, criminality and epilepsy as, 103

 Erotism, strong, abnormal in women, 59

 Eskimo, skull of, 35

 Esquirol, 7

 Ethos and pathos, 164

 Eugenics, 123, 128, 129, 146

 Eurygnathism, 26, 29

 Eusapia Palladino, 169, 172, 175, 176

 Evolution of man from unknown primate asserted by Lombroso in 1871, 33
   social, _versus_ revolution, 120

 Evolutionism, English, 7

 Experimental method, Lombroso’s tendency to neglect the, 135–137

 Extreme value of weights and measurements in criminal brains, 40, 41,
    42
   in criminal physiognomy, 49–51
   in criminal skulls, 37, 38, 40, 41, 42


                                   F.

 Facts and documents of positivism, 178–181
   Lombroso’s respect for, 134

 Faraday, 178, 179

 Fechner, 137, 180

 Ferrati, 156

 Ferrero, G., 56, 57, 81

 Ferri, Enrico, 79, 140, 169, 177

 Ferri, Luigi, 169

 Feuerbach, 178

 “First Principles,” 116

 Flaubert, 179

 Fontane, 180

 Force and cunning, 160

 Forehead, receding, 27, 31, 32

 Forel, 168

 Fossa, middle occipital, 28, 32

 “Fra Diavolo,” skull of, 32

 France and the revolutionary spirit, 68, 72–74

 Frassati, 177

 Free will, illusion of, 133

 Frigerio, 48

 Frigidity, sexual, of prostitutes, 63


                                   G.

 Gabelli, 141

 Gall, 13, 14, 17

 Garofalo, 140, 141

 Gasparone, skull of, 32

 Genius, 70–73, 119, 120, 162–164
   and anomaly, 162

 “Genius and Degeneration,” 162

 Genius and epilepsy, 162
   its freedom from misoneism, 70
   function of, in promoting social evolution, 120
   index of, for the departments of France, 72
   in the insane, 163, 164
   and republicanism, 72, 73
   and revolution, 70–72

 Géricault’s drawing, “Tête d’un Supplicié,” 51

 Gladstone, W. E., 181

 Gobineau, 129

 Goethe, 111, 113

 Goncourt, de, 180

 Gosio, 156

 Greek racial elements in Calabria, 129

 Greenlander, brain of, 44, 45

 “Greeting from the spirit-world, a,” 176

 Griesinger, 7, 100, 180

 Growth, correlation of, 104

 Gudden, 7


                                   H.

 Haeckel, 118, 181
   quoted, 118 note

 Hamel, Van, 142, 143

 Handle-shaped and projecting ear, 104

 Harden, Maximilian, 81

 Heinze, 88 note

 Hellenic racial elements in Calabria, 129

 Helmholtz, 134, 178, 179

 “Henkelohr,” 47, 104

 Hereditary equivalents, criminality and epilepsy as, 103

 Heredity. See also Inheritance criminal, 96, 97

 Herschel, 178

 History, determinist view of, 107 _et seq._

 Hohlenfels, prehistoric man of, 33

 Homo delinquens, 120.
   See also Criminal industrialis, 122
   neanderthalensis, 120.
   See also Primitive man sapiens, 124
     natural variability of, and its consequences, 120

 Huggins, 180

 Humanism, modern, 125

 Huxley, 180

 Hygiene, racial, 128

 Hylozoism, 133

 Hypnotism, 168

 Hypospadias, 104


                                   I.

 Ibsen, 180

 Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People,” 154

 Illusion of free will, the, 133

 Imbecility. See also Insanity and crime, 84, 85

 Impatience of reformers, 145

 Imprisonment, Mittelstaedt on, 141

 Impulsive criminality, 84, 85, 94

 Inca bone, the, 35

 “Inchiesta Agraria,” 114

 Incorrigibility of criminals, 97

 Individual differences, comparatively unimportant, 161
   and environment, 132 _et seq._
     factors influencing, 158–160

 Individualism and Socialism, Lombroso’s attitude towards, 124

 Industrial arts and positivism, 133

 Inheritance of criminal tendencies, 96, 97, 101
   pathological, 161, 162

 Inhibition, lack of, in criminals, 42, 94

 Innovation and misoneism, 66–69

 Insensibility of born criminal, 88, 89

 Insanity and crime, 84, 85
   genius and, 163, 164

 Insanity, moral, 100–103, 117
   a professional disease of prisoners, 97

 Inspiration, cosmic determination of, 163

 “Intellectuals,” the, and Italian Socialism, 149

 Italian influence on penal reform, 143, 144


                                   J.

 Jargon of criminals, 88 note, 91, 92

 Jewish aristocracy, the, 164, 165
   spirit, the, 129

 Jews, civil disabilities of, 2

 Joule, 178

 Judenhetze. See Anti-semitism

 Jurisprudence, criminal, 139–149


                                   K.

 Kant, 111

 Kirchhoff, 180

 Kirn, 103

 Knecht, 103

 Kosciuszko’s “spirit,” 170

 Kraepelin, 141

 Krauss, 94

 Kuliszew, Madame, 81

 Kurella, 177

 Kurella’s “Naturgeschichte des Verbrechers,” 94, 96


                                   L.

 Labour bureaus, Lombroso advocates, 128

 “La donna delinquente, la prostituta, e la donna normale,” 56.
   See also “Woman as Criminal”

 Land reform, 156, 157

 Laschi, 78

 Lassalle, 71, 180
   characterization of, 71

 Lavater, 111

 Law, Lombroso’s interest in, 126
   uniformity of, 137

 Le Play, 179

 Levi, Zefira (mother of Cesare Lombroso), 2, 3

 Liebig, Von, 179, 181

 Life-work as social reformer, Lombroso’s, 106–129, 148

 List, 178

 Liszt, Von, 141

 Lombroso, Aron, 1

 Lombroso, Cesare, birth, 1
   the family, 1–3
   childhood and youth, 1–10
   family history, 1–3
   antecedents, 1–13
   revolutionary tendencies, 4
   and Marzolo, 5, 6
   and Panizza, 7, 33
   and Moleschott, 7, 8, 9, 10
   and Skoda, 9
   and Virchow, 9
   and Mantegazza, 10
   and Golgi, 11
   predecessors in research, 13–17
   criminal anthropology, 18–54
   comparison of European
   with melanodermic races (“L’uomo bianco e l’uomo di colore”), 33
   opposition to his views, 55, 56
   merits and defects of his work, 56, 57, 65
   “Woman as Criminal and Prostitute,” 56–64
   “Political Criminals and Revolutions,” 64–79
   “L’ uomo di genio,” 72
   “The Man of Genius,” 72
   _Archivia di psichiatria_, 79
   home life at Turin, 79–83
   criminal psychology, 79–105
   daughters of, 80
   “Palimsesti del carcere,” 95 note
   on the relations between epilepsy and criminality, 98–103
   his conception of epilepsy, 99
   and the term “degeneration,” 104, 105
   as a social reformer, 106–129
   his methods, 106–129
   his significance in the history of science, 106 _et seq._
   his method of work, 111 _et seq._
   his pathographies, 112
   work on “Cardanus,” 112
   talent for analogy, 112
   work in Calabria, 114
   on the conception of “the social organism,” 116, 124
   his principal contributions to sociology, 118 _et seq._
   and the class war, 121, 122, 124
   and “revaluation,” 119, 128
   his attitude towards Socialism, 124
   his philosophy, 124
   as municipal councillor, 124 note
   not a “party man,” 124
   and democracy, 125
   and humanism, 125
   and social reform, 125–129
   views on Parliamentary government, 125 note, 128
   views on universal suffrage, 126 note
   interested in the legal rather than the economic order, 126
   and capitalism, 127
   and industrialism, 127
   and the agrarian problem, 127
   and “protection,” 127
   and decentralization of government, 127
   and labour bureaus, 128
   views on punishment in general, and on capital punishment in
      particular, 128
   advocates artificial selection, 128
   and eugenics, 128
   on pellagra, 129
   on races of Southern Italy, 129
   significance of criminal anthropology, 130–138
   on criminal law and its enforcement, 131
   hylozoist ideas, 133
   and positive science, 134
   his respect for facts, 134
   his hunger for material, 134
   insufficient verification of facts by, 135
   occasional credulity of, 135
   spiritualistic experiences, 135
   his conception of anthropology, 135, 136
   his preference for observing _states_ rather than processes, 135
   and the experimental method, 135, 136
   and Fechner’s psycho-physics, 137
   often misunderstood by German biologists and psychiatrists, 137
   and the notion of uniformity, 137
   and positivism, 138
   and determinism, 138
   and social reactivity, 138
   and responsibility, 138
   and apportionment of punishment, 138
   “L’ uomo delinquente,” 140
   and criminal jurisprudence, 139–149
   and “School of Positive Criminology,” 140
   on punishment, 140, 145
   and Ferri, 140
   and Garofalo, 141
   and Kraepelin, 141
   and the science of law, 144
   a utilitarian, 146
   and the Congress for Criminal
   Anthropology in 1906, 147, 148, 157
   pessimism, tendency to, in old age, 148
   mystical tendency, 148
   an optimist in the field of social reform, 148
   as leader of Italian political radicalism, 149
   and Marxist Socialism, 124 _et seq._, 149
   freedom from opportunism, 149
   opposed to compromise, 149
   the pellagra controversy, 149–157
   proscribed for political reasons in 1898, 153
   boycotted by the well-to-do, 154
   “Cause and Prevention” the keynote of his life-work, 154
   as experimental pathologist, 155
   and agrarian reform, 156, 157
   his character, 157
   as “an enemy of the people,” 154, 157
   on “Cause and Prevention,” 158
   on the influence of environment, 159, 160
   “Causes and Prevention of Crime,” 160
   his biological determinism, 161, 162
   “The Man of Genius,” 162, 163
   “Genius and Degeneration,” 162
   “Insanity of Cardanus,” 162
   life-work of, 164
   his genius and personality, 164–166
   a member of the Jewish aristocracy, 164, 165
   “the slave of facts,” 165
   his ready grasp of the essential, 166
   contributions to Italian culture, 166
   spiritualistic researches, 167–176
   and Eusapia Palladino, 169, 172, 175, 176
   effect on his character of the hostile reception of his theories
      regarding the etiology of pellagra, 172, 173
   “Studi sull’ ipnotismo e sulla credulità,” 173, 174
   on the material nature of the will, 174
   on muscle-reading, 174
   on thought-transference, 174
   on misoneism as a hindrance to the acceptance of new discoveries, 175
   “Ricerche sui fenomeni ipnotisi e spiritici” (a posthumous work), 176
   and the “Spirit-World,” 176
   Gina, 177
   Paola, 177
   contributions to “Positivism,” 180, 181

 Loria, 78, 124

 Lubbock, 181

 Lucas, 14

 Lucchini, 141

 Lumbroso, 1 note

 Lunatic, the criminal, 140, 145

 “L’ uomo delinquente,” 140

 Luzzati, Luigi, 78

 Lyell, 134, 179, 180


                                   M.

 Maffia, the, 91

 Magnet, its alleged influence upon suggested colour sensations 173, 174

 Magnetism, animal, 168

 “Man of Genius, the,” 162, 163

 Man, palæolithic, 44
   prehistoric. See Primitive man
   primitive. See Primitive man

 Manet, 180

 Man’s place in Nature, 117, 134

 Mantegazza, 10, 135

 Marriage and prostitution, 67 note

 Marx, Karl, 107, 108, 110, 116, 124, 149, 179
   and Marxism, 124

 Marzolo, 5, 6, 157

 Masochistic nature of woman, 59

 Material nature of the will, 174

 Materialism, 107 _et seq._ See also Determinism
   German, 7

 Matteucci, 178

 Mattoids, 77, 118
   and revolts, 71

 Mayer, R., 134, 178

 Measurement of punishment, 131, 138

 Medievalism, persistent, 5

 Mediterranean region, races of, 129

 Mediums, spiritualistic, 136

 Meteorological influences, 159

 Method of work, Lombroso’s, 111 _et seq._

 Meynert, 181

 Microcephaly, partial, in relation to criminality, 41

 Milan, bread-riots at, 1898, 153

 Mill, J. S., 178, 180, 181

 Millet, 179

 Misoneism, 66–76
   as manifested in the pellagra controversy, 151
   in relation to new discoveries, 175

 Mittelstaedt, 141

 Moeli, 103

 Moleschott, 7, 8, 9, 10, 134, 179

 Moral development, inferior in women, 59
     ultimate goal of, 59
   imbecile, the, 102
   imbecility, 104
   insanity, 100–103

 Morality, traditional and ideal, 67 note

 Morbidity and crime, 97

 Morel, 13–17, 105, 179

 Morel’s ear, 48

 “Morlocks,” the, 123 note

 Mosso’s plethysmograph, 172

 Motherhood, woman’s function of, its influence on her sexual
    differentiation, 57–59

 Mother-sense, lack of, in genuine women criminals and in prostitutes,
    63
   unimpaired, in female criminals, by passion, and female occasional
      criminals, 62, 63

 Müller, F. Max, quoted, 92 note

 Muscle-reading, 174


                                   N.

 Naegeli, 179

 Naturalism in art, 133

 Nature, criminal. See Criminal type

 Nature, man’s place in, 117, 134

 Neanderthal, 32, 120

 Nicolson, 14, 16

 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 86, 163

 Non-moral, woman fundamentally so (in Lombroso’s view), 59


                                   O.

 Occasional criminals form the majority of women criminals, 62–64

 Occultism. See Spiritualism

 Organizations, criminal, 91

 “Organism” of human society, 116
   a strained metaphor, 124

 Organs, rudimentary. See Rudimentary

 Ossification of sutures of skull, peculiarities in, 34, 35


                                   P.

 Palæolithic man, 44

 Palladino, Eusapia, 169, 172, 175, 176

 Panizza, Bartolomeo, 7, 33

 Parasitism of criminals, 95

 Parliamentary government, Lombroso on, 125 note, 128

 Passion, criminality by, 100

 Pasteur, 180

 Pathographies, 112, 163

 Pathological inheritance, 161

 Pathos and ethos, 164

 Pellagra, 12, 129, 149–157, 172, 173
   recent theories as to its etiology, 152, 153 note
   in the United States, 156 note

 Pellagrozeïn, 156

 Pellizzi, 45, 156

 Penal reform, 139–149

 Perthes, Boucher de, 180

 Pflüger, 134, 179

 “Physical phenomena” of spiritualism, Lombroso’s interpretation of, 171

 Physiognomy, the criminal, 47–53

 Pickmann, 172, 176

 Place in Nature, man’s, 134

 Play, le, 179

 Plehve, 110

 Plethysmograph, Mosso’s, 172

 Poetry and art, naturalism in, 133

 Political crime, essence of, 67
   individual factors of, 76–79

 “Political crime,” 119

 Political criminals, 55
   classification of, 55, 56

 “Political Criminals and Revolution,” 64–79

 Politics, realism in, 133

 Porta, 173

 Positive criminology, school of, 140
   view of the world, 133

 Positivism, 134, 138
   French, 7
   and the industrial arts, 133
   and scientific progress, 133
   preparatory work (1841–1850), 178
   dominance (1851–1860), 179
   four classical years (1857–1860), 179, 180
   after-effects (1861–1865), 180, 181
   facts and documents of, 178–181

 Predisposition to crime, 160
   its organic character, 97

 Prehistoric man. See Primitive Man

 Prel, du, 176

 Preyer, 168

 Prichard, 14, 16, 17

 Primatoid varieties, 27, 29, 30, 43, 44, 54
   definition of term, 30, 31

 Primitive man, 32, 33. See also Atavism

 Professional crime, 90

 Prognathism, 27, 31

 Progress as influenced by climatic and other physical conditions, 72–76
   inevitable slowness of, 68
   positivism and, 133
   prerequisites of, 67 _et seq._

 Proletarian, the, 122
   criminality, 86

 Prometheus, the fire of, 164

 Prostitute, the, 56

 Prostitutes, commonly sexually frigid, 63

 Prostitution, 115
   antiquity of, 59
   an atavistic phenomenon in Lombroso’s view, 58, 59
   as counterpart of major criminality in the male, 60–62
   and marriage, 67 note

 Protection, Lombroso opposed to, 127

 Pseudo-genius and revolt, 71

 Psycho-physics, 137

 Psychology, criminal, 79–105

 Punishment, 138
   apportionment of, 131
   theory of, 145, 146


                                   Q.

 Quetelet, 107, 160, 178


                                   R.

 Races of Calabria, 114, 129

 Races of Southern Italy, 114, 129

 Radicalism, Lombroso and, 149

 Ranke, Johannes, 40–42

 Reaction the fruit of too rapid innovation, 68–70

 Reactivity, social, 131, 138, 142

 Realism in politics, 133

 Receding forehead. See Forehead Recidivism, 97

 Reciprocal action between individual and environment, 132–134

 Recklessness of criminals, 84, 85

 Reform, agrarian, 156, 157
   penal, 139–149

 Reformer, social, Lombroso as, 106–129, 148

 Reformers, impatience of, 145

 Reforms, true, how effected, 126.
   See also Misoneism

 Reich, 8

 Relapses into crime, 97

 Renan, 8, 180

 Republicanism and genius, 72, 73

 Researches into spiritualism, 167–176

 Responsibility, 83–86, 97, 130, 132, 133, 138
   the problem of, 130, 132, 138

 Revaluation of old values, 119, 128

 Revolts, 71

 Revolution, 64–79.
   See also Political crime
   nature of, 70

 Revolutionist. See Political criminal
   by passion, 77

 Ribot, 96

 “Ricerche sui fenomeni ipnotisi e spiritici,” 176

 Richet, 168, 169

 _Ride du vice_, 53

 Ridges, superciliary, 27, 32

 Romance peoples of Mediterranean region, 129

 Roncoroni, 45

 Rudimentary organs, 45–47

 Ruhmkorff, 179

 Russell, Lord John, 181


                                   S.

 Sander, 103

 Scaphocephaly, 35

 Schaeffle, 117

 Schiff, 179

 Schleicher, 180

 Schönlank, 110

 School of Positive Criminology, 140

 Schopenhauer, 107, 117, 179

 Science. See Positivism

 Scientific. See Positive

 Segregation of anti-social types, 146

 Selection, artificial, 128. See also Eugenics

 Semitic racial elements, importance of, 129

 Semper, 180

 Sensibility, lesser, of woman, 58
   lack of, in born criminals, 88, 89
     and in epileptics, 99

 Sergi, 169

 Sexual differentiation, 57, 58, 126,
     See also Differentiation
   Lombroso’s law of, 57
   in savages as compared with civilized races, 58

 Sexual frigidity of prostitutes, 63

 Sexuality increased in genuinely criminal feminine types, 63
   not increased in female criminals by passion and female occasional
      criminals, 63

 Siemiradzki, 169, 170, 176

 Significance of criminal anthropology, 130–138

 Simian characteristics of criminals.
   See Primatoid varieties

 Skoda, 9

 Skull, anomalies of, in relation to
   moral imbecility, 104
   cubical capacity of, 36–38
   Eskimo, 25
   eurygnathism, 26, 29
   Inca bone, 35
   measurements of, extreme values common in criminals, 37, 38, 40, 41,
      42
   peculiarities of, in relation to criminal anthropology, 26–39
   peculiarities in ossification of sutures, 34, 35
   prognathism, 27, 31
   scaphocephaly, 35
   stenocrotaphy, 41
   submicrocephalic, in criminals, 37
   sutures, ossification of, 34, 35
   Wormian bones, 35

 Slang. See Jargon

 Social environment, man and, 132–134
   inadequacy of degenerate individuals, 104
   reactivity, 131, 138, 142
     _versus_ punishment, 142
   reformer, Lombroso as, 106–129, 148

 Social sentiments, their congenital character, 119

 Socialism, Italian school of, 124
   Lombroso and, 124 _et seq._, 149

 Socialist? was Lombroso a, 124

 Society as an “organism,” conception of, 116, 117

 Sociology, Lombroso’s principal contribution to, 118 _et seq._

 Sommer, 103, 177

 Soutenage, 60

 Spencer, Herbert, 116, 117, 178, 180

 Spinoza, 107, 117

 Spiritualistic researches, 167–176

 “Spirit-world,” the, 176

 Spy, prehistoric human remains of, 32

 Statistical method, the, 134, 136

 Steinheil, Madame, 83

 Stenocrotaphy, 41

 Stigmata of degeneration, 103–105, 136

 Stone Age, 44

 Struggle, the class. See Class war

 Subject-matter of criminal anthropology, 132

 Suffrage, universal, Lombroso’s views on, 126 note

 Suggestion in the waking state, 168

 Superman, criminal’s own persuasion that he is, 46

 Supermen, breeding of, 123, 128, 129

 Sutures of skull, peculiarities in ossification, 34, 35

 Sympathy, greater development of, in women, 58, 59


                                   T.

 Taine, 181

 Tamburini, 175

 Tariffs, protectionist, Lombroso opposed to, 127

 Tattooing, 92, 93

 Teeth, abnormalities of, 104

 Telepathy, 167, 168, 169, 174, 175

 Teleurgists, 169

 Telluric influences, 159

 Temperature and political crime, 75, 76

 Thaumaturgy, 168, 169

 Theory of punishment, 145, 146

 Theromorphism, 12, 19, 20, 21, 58

 Theromorphs in women, their significance greater than in men, 58

 Thomson, J. Bruce, 14

 Thought-reading, 167, 168, 169, 174, 175

 Thought-transference, 167, 168, 169, 174, 175

 “Time Machine, the,” quoted, 122 note

 Tirelli, 156

 Tocqueville, 179

 Toldt’s “Atlas of Human Anatomy,” 35 note

 Tolstoy, 180
   and “The Hanging Czar,” 153

 Torus occipitalis, 29
   palatinus, 26

 Tourgueneff, 180

 Traditional criminality, 90

 Trance, 136

 Trance-state, the, 176

 Trickery, “spiritualistic,” 169

 Troppmann, 88 note

 Truth, alleged dangers of, 9

 Tubercle of Darwin, 47

 Type, criminal. See Criminal


                                   U.

 Universal suffrage. See Suffrage


                                   V.

 Values, extreme, of weights and measurements. See Extreme values
   revaluation of, 119, 128

 Van Hamel, 142, 143

 Vanity of habitual criminal, 89

 Variability, lesser, of woman, 58

 Vico, 5, 107

 Villon, François, 91

 Virchow, 9, 135, 179

 Von Alesakow, 176

 Von Liebig, 179, 181

 Von Liszt, 141


                                   W.

 Wages and prices in relation to crime, 87, 88

 Wagner, A., 180

 Wagner, Richard, 163, 178, 179

 War, the class. See Class war

 Weber, W., 178

 Wells, H. G., quoted, 122 note

 Westermarck, 59

 Whitman, Walt, 179

 Will, the, and action at a distance, 174
   material nature of, 174

 Woman, lesser variability of, 58
   lesser sensibility of (general, and to pain), 58
   sympathy, greater development of, 58, 59
   cruelty in, 58
   masochistic nature of, 59
   erotism, strong, abnormal in, 59
   moral development, inferiority of, 59

 Woman as criminal, 55–64
   absence of distinctive anthropological characters in, 55, 56
   prostitution in women regarded by Lombroso as counterpart of
      criminality in men, 60, 61
   comparative infrequency of criminality in women, 61, 62
   chiefly criminals by passion and occasional criminals, 62, 63, 64

 Woolner’s tip, 47

 World-all, the, 132 _et seq._

 Wormian bones, 35

 Wundt, 180


                                   Y.

 Youthful criminals, 97


                                   Z.

 Zamboni’s dry battery, 172

 Zola, 180

 Zöllner, 168

 _Zukunft_, 81

-----

Footnote 1:

  The family name, originally pronounced Lumbroso, shows clearly that
  the family belonged to the Spanish Jews who were expelled from Spain
  and settled in North Africa. The name is a Spanish adjective in common
  use, denoting “clear” or “illuminating.”

Footnote 2:

  Bartolomeo Panizza—in 1812–13 army surgeon attached to the grande
  armée in Russia; in 1815 professor of anatomy at Pavia—discovered the
  characteristic of the crocodile to which Brücke gave the name of
  _foramen Panizzæ_; widely known as a teratologist and comparative
  anatomist; in 1856 published his “Osservazioni sperimentali sul nervo
  ottico,” based upon the method of secondary degeneration of the
  medullary sheath, subsequently applied by Gudden with such valuable
  results.

Footnote 3:

  I have not been able to ascertain precisely to what extent Lombroso
  was influenced by Quetelet. The writings of this investigator did not
  reach him directly, but they probably influenced him indirectly by way
  of von Oettingen’s “Moral Statistik.”

Footnote 4:

  “Ricerchi sul cretinesimo in Lombardia,” _Gazz. Medica Italiana
  Lombarda_, No. 13, 1859.

Footnote 5:

  Together with Mantegazza, his colleague (as experimental pathologist)
  in Pavia from 1861 to 1866, Lombroso was the founder of anthropology
  in Italy. Of anthropology in the modern sense it is possible to speak
  only since, in the year 1859, Broca founded the Parisian
  Anthropological Society. Previously the term had denoted, as Kant’s
  “Anthropology” shows, empirical descriptive psychology. From the first
  the doctrine of the important varieties of human beings (insanity,
  cretinism, criminality, genius, degeneration) was for Lombroso a
  chapter of general anthropology. From the first also he regarded a
  knowledge of the environment as of the greatest importance for an
  understanding of the origin of these varieties (_vide infra_).

Footnote 6:

  In Pavia, in 1871, he was appointed, in addition, lecturer on forensic
  medicine and hygiene.

Footnote 7:

  Lombroso, as professor of forensic medicine, was also a member of the
  legal faculty. From 1896 onwards he held, in addition, the position of
  professor-in-ordinary of psychiatry and superintendent of the
  psychiatric clinic. As early as 1891 he had received the appointment
  of professor-extraordinary of psychiatry. In the year 1900, the
  Minister of Education (L. Bianchi) appointed him professor-in-ordinary
  of criminal anthropology, whilst he retained the professorship of
  psychiatry.

Footnote 8:

  The title given by the author, then only nineteen years of age, to
  this study of important relations of correlation, does not give an
  adequate notion of the real contents of the essay.

Footnote 9:

  These two works, with two publications regarding criminal lunatics
  (1871), and the “Antropometria di 400 delinquenti veneti” (_R.C. dell’
  Istituto Lombardo_, fasc. 12) form the nucleus of his subsequent work
  on “L’ uomo delinquente.”

Footnote 10:

  A. Baer, one of the fiercest opponents of criminal anthropology,
  pushes his criticism so far as to maintain in his leading work “that
  the formation of the skull is in no way dependent upon that of the
  brain.” The book, upon p. 12 of which will be found this monumental
  nonsense, is entitled by Baer “Der Verbrecher in anthropologischer
  Beziehung” (“The Criminal from the Anthropological Standpoint”),
  Leipzig, 1893.

Footnote 11:

  “Iets over criminelle Anthropologie,” Haarlem, 1896; P. H. J. Berends,
  “Eenige Schedelmaten van Recruten, Mordenaars, Paranoisten,
  Epileptici, en Imbecillen,” Nymegen, 1896.

Footnote 12:

  The “Inca bone” will be found figured in Toldt’s “Atlas of Human
  Anatomy” (London: Rebman, Limited), p. 100, fig. 218, where it is
  described as “a large Wormian bone in the uppermost part of the
  lambdoid suture.”

Footnote 13:

  Certain peculiarities are discoverable in the brains of criminals
  which are not yet explicable on comparative anatomical considerations.
  I have described these as _atypical_, and in my “Natural History of
  the Criminal” I have collected and discussed them. Since the date of
  publication of this work (1893) only one extensive investigation of
  the brains of criminals has been undertaken, and in this the number of
  brains dealt with was about equal to the number examined in all the
  previous investigations put together. In so far as it furnishes any
  new particulars, this investigation confirms the doctrine of criminal
  anthropology, a fact of especial interest for the reason that the
  brains examined were chiefly those of women (Leggiardi-Laura, _Rivista
  di sc. biologiche_, ii., 4–5, 1900; _ibid._, _Giorn. de le R.
  Accademia di Torino_, 1900, fasc. 5).

Footnote 14:

  The _ear-point_, or _tubercle of Darwin_, is a small prominence on the
  edge of the helix, an atavistic vestige of the former point of the
  ear. It is sometimes called _Woolner’s tip_, Darwin’s attention having
  been drawn to this prominence by the sculptor Woolner (Toldt’s “Atlas
  of Human Anatomy,” London, Rebman, Limited).

Footnote 15:

  The Germans speak of thieves as being _langfingerig_, “long-fingered,”
  in the same sense in which we in England speak of them as
  “light-fingered.”—TRANSLATOR.

Footnote 16:

  “La Donna Delinquente, la Prostituta, e la Donna Normale.”

Footnote 17:

  Havelock Ellis confirms this statement, as the result of a most
  laborious investigation (“Man and Woman,” 4th edition, London, 1904,
  chap. xvi, and appendix).

Footnote 18:

  Aschaffenburg also writes: “I believe that in some instances we are
  entitled to regard the prostitute as the equivalent of the criminal;
  but, notwithstanding this, I believe that the complement to the
  prostitute is to be looked for, not in the thief, the pickpocket, or
  the forger, but rather in the beggar and the vagrant.”

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTE.—Lombroso’s views regarding the prostitute are
  disputed by many who accept the greater part of his teachings in the
  matter of criminal anthropology. Prostitution is largely a
  socially-caused phenomenon, and therefore prostitutes, in so far as
  they are the complements of criminals will be mainly complementary to
  socially-caused and occasional “criminals,” _not_ to habitual and
  instinctive criminals. Thus, Bloch (“The Sexual Life of Our Time,”
  London, Rebman, Ltd., 1909, p. 401), while admitting that the world of
  crime is very near to that of prostitution—because the prostitute has
  need of a man to whom she is not simply a chattel, to whom she can be
  something from the personal point of view, and also because she shares
  with the criminal the life of the social pariah—goes on to say:
  “Lombroso’s doctrine that prostitution is throughout equivalent to
  criminality is certainly not justified. It is only by the outward
  circumstances of their life that the bulk of prostitutes are driven
  into intimate relations with criminality.” For a careful consideration
  of the pros and cons of this profoundly important question, with
  reference to leading authorities, see Havelock Ellis, “Sex in Relation
  to Society,” pp. 266–269.

Footnote 19:

  In Germany in the year 1899 (“Statistik des Deutschen Reichs,” vol.
  xxxii., II., 50–65), for every 100 men condemned for the offences
  specified below, there were of women convicted of the like offence:

                Crime and misdemeanour in general  19·3
                Breaches of the peace              12·0
                Perjury                            14·6
                False accusation                   35·8
                Procurement                       164·6
                Procuring abortion                375·9
                Infant exposure                   400·0
                Fraud                              20·0
                Injury to property                  6·0
                Simple assault                     11·8
                Aggravated assault                  7·9
                Petty larceny                      37·9
                Major thefts                       13·3

Footnote 20:

  Compare Walter Bagehot’s phrase, “the pain of a new idea,” which will
  be found in his brilliant little volume on “Physics and Politics” (p.
  163).—TRANSLATOR.

Footnote 21:

  Compare also Havelock Ellis, “Studies in the Psychology of Sex,” vol.
  vi., “Sex in Relation to Society,” where this fundamental and
  profoundly important paradox is most thoughtfully expounded. After
  explaining the difference between _traditional morality_ and _ideal
  morality_, the former being concerned with the accepted standards of
  social conduct, the latter embodying an attempt to reform those
  standards, and showing how the two moralities are of necessity opposed
  each to the other, Ellis goes on to say (_op. cit._, p. 368): “We have
  to remember that they are both equally sound and equally
  indispensable, not only to those who accept them, but to the community
  which they continue to hold in vital theoretical balance. We have seen
  them both, for instance, applied to the question of prostitution;
  traditional morality defends prostitution, not for its own sake, but
  for the sake of the marriage system, which it regards as sufficiently
  precious to be worth a sacrifice, while ideal morality refuses to
  accept the necessity of prostitution, and looks forward to progressive
  changes in the marriage system which will modify and diminish
  prostitution.”—TRANSLATOR.

Footnote 22:

  Translated as “The Man of Genius.” London: Walter Scott.

Footnote 23:

  This brilliant expert has given the best summary of his own aims in
  the speech which he delivered in the year 1870 in Cincinnati, at the
  Congress for Prison Reform. He said: “When the chains have been
  removed, when corporal punishment has been abolished, when the
  treatment of prisoners has become something altogether different from
  what it has been in the past, when, in a word, in penology severity
  has been replaced by mildness and consideration, still it will not be
  easy to say if and to what extent this humane spirit will have dammed
  the spreading flood of crime, nor should I find it easy to determine
  precisely the grounds by which we have been guided to a decision
  whether severity or mildness is to be preferred.

  “To study the criminal, this is the first and the greatest need. After
  so many years filled with work and discussion we have arrived at the
  point from which we ought to have started, precisely because, after
  taking such an infinity of trouble, we have discovered nothing but
  emptiness.”

Footnote 24:

  “Pensieri sui processo Steinheil,” _Archivio di psichiatria_, etc.,
  vol. xxx., p. 87, 1909.

Footnote 25:

  The monumental work of the Public Prosecutor, E. Wulffen (Berlin,
  1909), offers a notable exception to this generalization.

Footnote 26:

  The born criminal is, invariably, utterly destitute of the feeling
  that he is doing wrong. Murderers frequently describe their misdeeds
  as trifles, as pardonable errors of youth, and they are astonished and
  indignant that they are so severely punished. To the true criminal,
  the pangs of conscience are entirely unknown, and a brutish
  indifference to death is a most frequent manifestation. This is shown
  very clearly in the turns of phrase met with in the jargon of
  criminals in relation to the punishment of execution. One of the most
  sensational trials in recent days—the trial of Heinze and of the
  prostitute with whom he lived—served to acquaint the general public
  with the phrase “cut the cabbage” for decapitation. The expression “to
  sneeze in the sack” corresponds to this (the guillotined head, when
  severed by the falling knife, is received in a sack); and there are
  many others. Lombroso gives numerous examples of a perfect equanimity
  persisting up to the very moment of death. One of his reports
  (_Archivio di psichiatria_, 1891, Section 4) tells us of a murderer
  who, whilst awaiting his execution, drew caricatures of the
  spectators. Allied to this indifference, appears to be the puzzling
  impulse of professional murderers before the commission of a crime to
  speak openly of their plans, and even to describe the actual details
  of the proposed murder. Troppmann, although he lied in court during
  the trial, while confined in his cell made drawings of the way in
  which he had committed the murder.

Footnote 27:

  _Cf._ F. Max Müller, “The Science of Thought,” 1887, pp. 270, 271: “If
  the science of language has proved anything, it has proved that every
  term which is applied to a particular idea or object, unless it be a
  proper name, is already a general term. _Man_ meant originally
  anything that could think; _serpent_, anything that could creep;
  _fruit_, anything that could be eaten.”—TRANSLATOR.

Footnote 28:

  Very various significations are attached to the term “criminal
  psychology.” Some denote by it a general theory of responsibility;
  some, an account of the mental disorders which have forensic
  importance; some, the theory of the will, of purpose, of deliberation,
  of design, of resolve, of the associations with and the aids to crime;
  some, the developmental history of individual criminals, or a
  description of the means by which they have been led to commit some
  particular crime, or which they have adopted in the course of its
  performance; some, finally, denote by the term a classification of the
  world of criminals in accordance with character, after the manner of
  Benedikt and Krauss. The teaching of Lombroso is concerned solely with
  the elements of the criminal nature which possess an anthropological
  interest, just as the ethnologist endeavours to elucidate the natural
  character of a race.

Footnote 29:

  “Naturgeschichte des Verbrechers” (“The Natural History of the
  Criminal”), pp. 230–246.

Footnote 30:

  See above, p. 42, the observations of Professor Ranke.

Footnote 31:

  In Lombroso’s “Palimsesti del carcere” (1891) are to be found
  extremely interesting histories of the childhood of criminals, to
  which, in my German edition of the work, I have added certain
  observations of my own (Hamburg, 1900).

Footnote 32:

  Lombroso’s syllogism: “All criminals are morally insane, all
  epileptics are morally insane, therefore all criminals are
  epileptics,” should have been stated in the hypothetical rather than
  in the categorical form.

Footnote 33:

  “Il delitto politico e le rivoluzioni,” Turin, Fratelli Bocca, 1890.
  (A French translation of this work has been published.)

Footnote 34:

  _Archivio di psichiatria_, vol. vi., p. 148, 1884.

Footnote 35:

  See p. 33.

Footnote 36:

  The _fundamental biogenetic law_ runs as follows: “The history of the
  fœtus is a recapitulation of the history of the race, or, in other
  words, ontogeny is a recapitulation of phylogeny.”—Haeckel, “The
  Evolution of Man,” Popular English Edition, p. 2.

Footnote 37:

  For the reason that in such a moral scheme the true social instinct is
  lacking.

Footnote 38:

  In his earliest great imaginative work, “The Time Machine,” Mr. H. G.
  Wells imagines in the distant future of our race such a
  differentiation into two types; the “Morlocks,” the underground race,
  who had taken to preying on the above-ground moiety, were the
  descendants of our present proletarians.—TRANSLATOR.

Footnote 39:

  In 1899 he was chosen as municipal councillor by one of the
  working-class quarters of Turin, and sat for some years. In this
  position, however, he attracted public attention only by his
  successful resistance to a proposed large municipal loan for the
  purpose of building a great electric power station, to be driven by
  water-power.

Footnote 40:

  Of parliamentary government he writes (“Delitto politico,” p. 531):
  “Parliamentary government, which has with justice been stigmatized as
  the greatest superstition of modern times, offers greater and ever
  greater obstacles to the introduction of a good method of government,
  so that, whilst the electors lose sight more and more of the high
  ideals of the State, some of the elected representatives obtain a
  freedom from responsibility which tends to the advantage of
  crime—which may, indeed, make of them occasional criminals, if they
  have not inherited the criminal nature. For five centuries Italy has
  fought for the abolition of the privileges of priests, feudal lords,
  and kings; and now in the name of freedom we endow 500 kinglets with
  inordinate privileges, and even free them from liability to
  prosecution for ordinary crime!”

  And of universal suffrage he writes: “In the general view, universal
  suffrage works for the abolition of class distinctions, but in the
  hands of the corrupt and the uncultured it may be directly subversive
  of freedom.

  “Let us therefore advocate everything that can be for the advantage of
  the common people, but let us at the same time give these latter only
  so much power as may be necessary to wring from the upper classes the
  concessions needful for the good of the commonalty” (“L’uomo
  delinquente: Cause e rimedii,” 1897, pp. 442, 443).

Footnote 41:

  “L’uomo delinquente.”

Footnote 42:

  See also R. Sommer, _Kriminalpsychologie_, 1904, p. 6 _et seq._ It may
  be mentioned that Sommer, in the spirit of positive science, has
  discovered methods by which psychomotor processes, some of which
  possess great crimino-psychological importance, may be rendered
  objectively cognizable.

Footnote 43:

  “Della pene” (R. Instituto Lombardo, Rendic, second series, vol.
  viii., pp. 993–1005, 1875); “Sull’ incremento del delitto in Italia e
  sui mezzi di arrestarlo,” Turin, 1879; Troppo presto. “Appunti al
  nuovo pregetto di codice penale,” Turin, 1888; “Il delitto politico e
  le rivoluzioni,” Turin, 1890. In addition, there was founded in the
  year 1880, in association with Ferri and Garofalo, the _Archivio di
  psichiatria_, “Scienze penali ed antropologia criminale” (Turin, E.
  Loescher).

Footnote 44:

  See above, p. 124 _et seq._

Footnote 45:

  In view of the fact that shortly after the death of Lombroso it was
  widely asserted both in the medical and the lay Press of this country
  and of the United States that Lombroso’s views regarding the nature of
  pellagra had recently been shown to be erroneous, I wrote to Dr.
  Kurella for further information. He replied as follows: “On receipt of
  your letter, I wrote to an Italian colleague to inquire of him what
  were the views presently held regarding the etiology of pellagra. He
  informs me that the majority of experimental pathologists in Italy
  remain convinced of the truth of Lombroso’s views. He also refers me
  to this year’s (1910) _Wiener Klinische Wochenschrift_, No. 23, p.
  963, where there is an article by Raubitschek, an Austrian
  experimenter, who claims to have confirmed Lombroso’s theory by means
  of experiments on rats.”

  Unquestionably, therefore, numerous investigators, both in Italy and
  elsewhere, hold fast by one form or other of the _zeist_ theory of the
  etiology of pellagra, which Lombroso believed himself to have
  established beyond the possibility of refutation. But during the past
  year this theory has, nevertheless, been largely discredited. In the
  _Lancet_ of February 12, 1910, will be found the report of the
  Pellagra Investigation Commission, in which some of the alternative
  hypotheses are discussed. Dr. Sambon was despatched by this Commission
  in charge of the Pellagra Field Commission in Italy, and in an
  editorial note in the _British Medical Journal_ of May 21, we are told
  that a telegram had been received from Dr. Sambon, under date of May
  13, stating “The Commission has definitely proved that maize is not
  the cause of pellagra; the parasitic conveyor is the _Simulium
  reptans_.” It is probable that the matter will soon be definitely
  settled, and it cannot be denied that pellagra presents many analogies
  with other endemic disorders due to protozoal infection conveyed by
  the bite of a blood-sucking insect.—TRANSLATOR.

Footnote 46:

  See the translation of Count Tolstoy’s pamphlet, “The Hanging Czar,”
  published by the Independent Labour Party.—TRANSLATOR.

Footnote 47:

  In view of this advice, it is interesting to note that I have just
  received a medical periodical published in the United States, from
  which I learn that during the winter of 1909–1910 the Romance and Slav
  population of the towns of the Mississippi States has been extensively
  ravaged by pellagra. As late as the year 1908, in the great American
  textbook, Osler’s “Principles and Practice of Medicine,” we learn that
  pellagra “has not been observed in the United States!”

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTE.—Dr. Kurella writes to me to the following effect:
  “I remember twenty-five years ago, in asylums both in Pennsylvania and
  in Illinois, finding cases of pellagra, with the characteristic
  skin-lesions, in addition to the mental disorder. But my American
  colleagues then ridiculed my diagnosis.”

Footnote 48:

  Among other tributes to Lombroso may be mentioned those which he
  received at the International Congress of Criminal Anthropology, held
  at Turin in the year 1906.

Footnote 49:

  English translation in Scott’s Contemporary Science Series.

Footnote 50:

  Milan, 1878. A volume of the International Scientific Series.

Footnote 51:

  Pure nominatives, such as anyone could extract from a dictionary in
  default of all knowledge of the language.

Footnote 52:

  See note to page 152.

Footnote 53:

  _Annales des Sciences Psychiques_, 1904.




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                          TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES


 1. Silently corrected typographical errors and variations in spelling.
 2. Anachronistic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings retained as
      printed.
 3. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.