Criminal Anthropology in Italy. that tattooed recruits are looked on as likely to make bad soldiers; and a private once spoke to Lombroso of tattooing as "convict habits." He presents, too, an extraordinary insensibility to pain, tattooing himself in places which even the Indians spare, and receiving or inflicting on himself the most terrible wounds without a murmur. He has a language of his own, employed even in cases where he would run no risk from using ordinary speech, and this still further isolates him from the rest of man kind. He has a writing of his own, too, made up of hieroglyphics and rough pic tures. Such briefly is the Frankenstein, which the modern science of criminal anthropology evokes; an unbalanced being, a pathological subject, whose illness takes a form which, hurtful to society, is defined as crime. For the facts collected by Lombroso place be yond all doubt the intimate connection be tween crime and mental derangements which has so long been suspected to exist. Mad men and criminals belong to the same fam ily; not in the sense of the vulgar and un thinking expression that all criminals are mad, though every-day experience in the police courts puts it beyond doubt that many are actually deranged, but in the sense that both classes are in a similar pathological state, which manifests itself on the one hand in lunacy, on the other in crime. This position is rendered still stronger by the revelations of genealogical statistics, which reveal the heredity through long generations of criminal tendencies, as they do of insanity, and alternations of crim inals and madmen, in the same or successive generations. Lombroso divides criminals into two great classes, the original or born delinquent, and the fortuitous offender, a man who becomes criminal through outward influences. The first, the synthesis of every degenera tion, the outcome of all biological deteriora tion, commits crimes against society by vir
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tue of a morbid process passing from one generation to another, derived from cerebral and other physiological conditions. In him the impulse of passion is not sullen or iso lated, but associates itself almost always with reflection. The second, on the con trary, the criminal of passion and impetus, acts at a given moment in consequence of an overwhelming stimulus, say a sudden access of jealousy. The two classes fre quently merge into each other, for the mere fact that a man, suddenly, without reflection, by a reflex act, as it were, stabs his offender or his unfaithful wife, proves that he is not normal. The want of reflection constitutes an extenuating circumstance before judge or jury, but before pathological psychology, says Signor Sergi,"it constitutes an accusa tion." The importance of the distinction is seen in the views taken on criminal jurisprudence by Lombroso and his school. It is gener ally said that to act logically in face of these views we should have to make extensive use of capital punishment. The most hasty perusal of Lombroso's books will show that this is not his view of the case. He lays immense stress on prevention, for even the morbid process may, he asserts, be modi fied in the very young, just as a disease, taken in time, may be cured, but, neglected, becomes chronic. He examines carefully the means adopted in various countries for refining the minds of children, and speaks warmly of English ragged schools. Juvenile refinement, strict but judicious control, education in the high est sense of the word — these must be, he argues, the primary object of every nation which aims at decreasing its criminality. He also advocates an association between various nations for the hunting of criminals, and for making such observations on their lives and habits as shall lead to their easier classification. In reformatories he has small belief; statistics show that they in no way decrease the percentage of recidivists; the
