broadly that in studying the criminal classes from the standpoint of anatomy, physiology, external appearance, even to the minuter shades of difference in the form of the skull and facial proportions, the criminal is a marked man. His abnormities are characteristic, and are to be diagnosticated in only one way. That these propositions are being rapidly established there can be no doubt. As an emphatic evidence of their truth, the criminal is able to transmit his criminal propensities even beyond the number of generations allotted to inheritance by Scripture.
William Douglas Morrison, in his Crime and its Causes, while denying these propositions, admits that degeneracy and disease are transmitted, and in these conditions seeks for the origin of crime.
A very significant relation is shown between crime and insanity in figures given by Malcolm Morris, as quoted by Dr. Emily "White, in her address on Hygiene as a Basis of Morals.[1] She says: "The intimate relationship between nervous diseases and crime is conspicuous. In England, the ratio of insane to sane criminals is thirty-four times as great as of the insane to the whole population, and criminal lunatics are in excess in the high proportion of seventeen to one." The persistence of criminal and vagabond taints is even more pronounced than that of lunacy; the latter condition often yields to benign treatment, and there is reason to believe that in time it may be eradicated, though confinement and consequent prevention of offspring will be the main cause of its disappearance. Whether criminal propensities can be obliterated is a grave question. Certainly the irrational and unscientific methods in the treatment of criminals to-day are as much responsible for the increase of crime as were the superstitious and unscientific ways of dealing with contagious diseases in earlier times responsible for their wide dissemination.
The repeated association of certain abnormities of the body with the criminal character suggesting simian features has led to the idea that congenital criminals are instances of reversion. Eminent students in this branch of study call attention to the resemblances of many minor details of structure to features in the higher apes. Dr. Fletcher admits that, while this view may be correct, it is purely hypothetical. The presence of certain abnormal muscles in man have been justly looked upon as evidence of reversion, and certainly the atavistic view clears up many points of structural difference seen in the criminal class which would otherwise be obscure. It is possible, however, that if the antecedents of all criminals were known, retention of ancestral traits and not reversion would be the more probable explanation
- ↑ Popular Science Monthly, May, 1887.
