THE STUDY OF THE CRIMINAL

The Criminal by Havelock Ellis is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here. THE STUDY OF THE CRIMINAL

II. THE STUDY OF THE CRIMINAL

When Homer described Thersites as ugly and deformed, with harsh or scanty hair, and a pointed head, like a pot that had collapsed to a peak in the baking—

ἄισχιστος δὲ ἀνὴρ ὑπὸ Ἴλιον ἦλθεν.
φολκὸς ἔην, χωλὸς δ’ ἕτερον πόδα. τὼ δέ οἱ ὤμω
κυρτώ, ἐπὶ στῆθος συνοχωκότε. αὐτὰρ ὕπερθεν
φοζὸς ἔην κεφαλὴν, ψεδνὴ δ’ ἐπενήνοθε λάχνη

—he furnished evidence as to the existence of a criminal type of man. These physical characters of Thersites are among those which in these last days have been submitted to scientific observation, and to statistics, and have been largely justified. The epigrammatic utterances in which primitive peoples crystallise and pass on their philosophy and science, include many sayings which prove the remote period at which men began to perceive the organic peculiarities which separate the criminal man from the average man. There are some proverbs of this character, such as those indicating the widespread dislike of the red-haired, for which no solid justification has yet been found; but among various races, and in many countries, numerous proverbs are in harmony with the results of modern research: A vultu vitium, the old Roman saying; Au vis [visage] le vice, the old French saying; “Salute from afar the beardless man and the bearded woman;” “Distrust the woman with a man’s voice;” “A pale face is worse than the itch.” Such are a few that might be easily increased.

At a very early period such popular generalisations as these were embodied in that empirical science of physiognomy, which found many professors among the Greeks and Romans. According to the well-known story, a Greek physiognomist who examined Socrates’ face judged that the philosopher was brutal, sensuous, and inclined to drunkenness; and Socrates declared to his disciples that such, although he had overcome it, was his natural disposition. He was himself a physiognomist; he disliked a certain man who was of pale and dark complexion, such signs, he said, indicating envy and murder; the peculiar dark and pallid complexion of the instinctive criminal has of late years been frequently noted.

Aristotle, that great master of all the sciences, clearly recognised not merely the physiognomic signs of habits, vices, and crimes, including many signs that are in accordance with modern scientific observation, but he also observed a connection between the shape of the head and the mental disposition, and he recognised the hereditary character of vicious and criminal instincts. Galen, who inaugurated the experimental study of the brain, adopted the views of Aristotle, and pointed out the influence of the abuse of alcohol in the production of crime; he was of opinion, also, anticipating a modern doctrine, that when the criminal is a criminal by nature he ought to be destroyed, not in revenge, but for the same reason that scorpions and vipers are destroyed.

Although these feeble beginnings of criminal anthropology received the sanction of the highest scientific authorities, as well as of the people, and later on a mediæval law declared that if two persons fell under suspicion of crime the uglier or more deformed was to be regarded as more probably guilty, they were not universally admitted, and some, like Pliny, regarded it as absurd that the outward form could indicate the inward disposition. Whatever art or science there was in the matter was left, then and long after, to the physiognomists, of whom Polemon may be taken as a distinguished example, and these were ready to supply the most elaborate physical signs to correspond to any vicious or criminal disposition. Polemon wrote of the criminal that he was of pallid complexion, with long hair, large ears, and small eyes, and he proceeded to give the characteristics of various classes of criminals, his observations often showing keen insight. This pseudo-science was passed on from physiognomist to physiognomist, usually with added absurdities, until in the sixteenth century we reach the Neapolitan Dalla Porta, at once the greatest (and except Lavater the last) of the physiognomists of the old school and the first of the new. He treated judicial astrology with contempt, and at the same time wrote a treatise of celestial physiognomy; he gathered up all that his predecessors had done, and at the same time laid the foundations of a more scientific treatment.

Passing by Lavater, with his fine intuition and genial humanity, which formed, however, no epoch in the scientific study of criminal anthropology, at the beginning of the present century we reach Gall, a very great figure in the history of science, and the representative of the most important moment in the development of our knowledge of the brain.

Before speaking of Gall, however, it is necessary to give a word, in passing, to Grohmann, who slightly preceded him, and who anticipated many of the conclusions relative to facial and cranial characteristics reached by modern criminal anthropologists. Thus, in 1820, he wrote:—“I have often been impressed in criminals, and especially in those of defective development, by the prominent ears, the shape of the cranium, the projecting cheek-bones, the large lower jaws, the deeply-placed eyes, the shifty, animal-like gaze.”

Gall thrust aside for ever the credulous fancies of the physiognomists; and he has been described, not altogether without reason, as the founder of the modern science of criminal anthropology. He was certainly its most brilliant pioneer. Lavater believed in the homogeneity of the human organism, but he was not a man of science, and he had been content to study the surface of the body; Gall, with true scientific instinct, tried to get to the root of the matter; following the great English anatomist, Willis, who had made some attempt at cerebral localisation, he studied the brain, sought to differentiate the functions of its various parts, and the effects of its varying development on the skull.

For Gall the varying development of the brain was the cause of the divergent mental and moral qualities of the individual; he was firmly convinced that all the facts of psychical life are rooted in the physical organisation; he wished to write the natural history of every primitive moral and intellectual force, in health as well as in disease. To the best of his ability he carried out this programme in detail, by an unceasing study of all the varieties of the brain and of the living head that he could find; he pursued his studies throughout Europe, in lunatic asylums and in prisons, as well as among the ordinary population, and he foresaw the extent of the applications of the science he was opening up to medicine and to law, to morality and to education. While his work extended far beyond the borders of what we should now call criminal anthropology, he devoted much attention to the problems of the criminal organisation, and even to its varieties, many of his observations according well with the results of recent investigation. More than this, following Galen and Diderot (who had written, fifty years earlier, “The evil-doer is one whom we must destroy, not punish”), he clearly advocated a method of dealing with the criminal which is now widely regarded as the only right and reasonable method. “There can be no question,” he said, “of culpability or of justice in the severe sense; the question is of the necessity of society preventing crime. The measure of culpability and the measure of punishment cannot be determined by a study of the illegal act, but only by a study of the individual committing it.” In his great work, Les Fonctions du Cerveau (1822), Gall has summed up his conclusions.

It has been the misfortune of this great and truly scientific investigator to give origin to an empiric art of phrenology which took the place of the old art of physiognomy he had done so much to destroy. He has consequently, until recent years, been popularly known chiefly by his mistakes, especially perhaps by his localisation of the sexual instinct in the cerebellum—a localisation, however, which he supported by a large body of evidence. The influence of dubious phrenological doctrines hardened into a system somewhat impairs the value of Lauvergne’s Les Forçats (1841), which seems to have been the first book of any importance devoted entirely to the study of convict nature, physical, moral, and intellectual. Lauvergne, who was the chief medical officer to the hospital for convicts at Toulon, appears to have been a man of humanitarian instincts, whose wit and bonhomie enabled him to maintain friendly relations with the criminals he was studying; he had little capacity for scientific analysis, but he wrote fully of what he had seen and known, and his book contains many keen observations which have been since verified. He fully recognises also the importance of the social factor in the production of criminals.

Lauvergne had observed how many of his subjects were insane or diseased; the students of the criminal who followed him all insisted on the pathological element. Dally maintained that the criminal and the lunatic are identical, and both equally irresponsible. Prosper Lucas, in his valuable Traité philosophique de l’hérédite (1847), showed how deeply rooted in the organism are the morbid tendencies of crime. Lélut compared the length and breadth of head in criminals. Voisin noted their defects in cerebral organisation. It was, however, Morel who, in his Des Dégénérescences (1857), chiefly developed this aspect of criminality, and his influence is still strong among French students of the criminal. Morel regarded crime as one of the forms taken on by degeneration in the individual or the family; and degeneration he defined as “a morbid deviation from the normal type of humanity.” The causes of degeneration which he recognised were intoxications, famines, social environment, industries, unhealthy occupations, poverty, heredity, pathological transformations, moral causes. “My principal aim,” he says, “has been the study of these causes, and of the influences which they exercise, firstly on the constitution of individuals, and afterwards on that of their descendants.” Among these causes he gives a chief place to the manifold effects on the children of alcoholism in the parents. In his pamphlet De la Formation du Type dans les variétés dégénérés (1864), Morel proposed to give the name of morbid anthropology to “that part of the natural science of man, the aim of which is to study the characters due to certain special diseased influences, as well as to hereditary transmissions of bad nature.”

Despine, by his great work, Psychologie Naturelle (1868), made a new and important step in criminology. Leaving aside the study of the criminal’s physical nature, he sought to make an exhaustive study of his mental nature. No one has done more than Despine to prove that what we should now call the instinctive criminal is, on the psychological side, a natural anomaly, a mental monstrosity. He brought into clear relief the unforeseeing imprudence, the entire lack of moral sensibility and of remorse, which characterise the instinctive criminal. He recognised that the criminal is not necessarily an insane or diseased person, and he showed that his abnormality is not of the kind that intellectual education can remedy. “No physiologist,” he said, “has yet occupied himself with the insanity of the sane;” he considered the criminal as “morally mad,” and therefore irresponsible. Maudsley, from an opposite philosophic standpoint, came to very similar conclusions. Without bringing any fresh contribution of importance, he re-affirmed emphatically the conclusions already reached. Speaking in his Responsibility in Mental Disease (1872) of instinctive criminals, he remarks, “It is a matter of observation that this criminal class constitutes a degenerate or morbid variety of mankind, marked by peculiarly low physical and mental characteristics.” Like Despine, he drew from this the conclusion, since widely accepted, that the criminal, being morally insane and usually incurable, should be treated in the same way as the intellectually insane person. “If the matter be considered deeply, it may appear that it would, perhaps, in the end make little difference whether the offender were sentenced in anger and sent to the seclusion of prison, or were sentenced more in sorrow than in anger, and consigned to the same sort of seclusion under the name of an asylum. The change would probably not lead to an increase or to a decrease in the number of crimes committed in a year.” An artist as much as a man of science, master of a sombre and weighty style, illumined by vivid flashes of imagination, Maudsley by his numerous works popularised the new ideas, and is justly regarded abroad as a pioneer of criminal anthropology.

Broca, who, by initiating the Anthropological Society of Paris in 1859, has been regarded as the founder of the modern science of anthropology, gave attention also to the special science of criminal anthropology by noting the peculiarities of the skulls and brains of criminals. At the Exeter meeting of the British Association in 1869, Dr. G. Wilson read a paper on “The Moral Imbecility of Habitual Criminals as exemplified by cranial measurements.” He had measured 464 heads of criminals, and found that habitual thieves presented well-marked signs of insufficient cranial development, specially anteriorly. “The cranial deficiency,” he observed, “is associated with real physical deterioration. Forty per cent. of all the convicts are invalids, more or less; and that percentage is largely increased in the professional thief class.” He argued that a prisoner must be treated on reforming principles, and not allowed unrestricted liberty until there was reasonable evidence to show that he would not prove dangerous to society. About the same time, also (in 1870), J. Bruce Thomson, Resident-Surgeon to the General Prison for Scotland at Perth, published in the Journal of Mental Science a summary of his observations on over 5000 prisoners. From the decisiveness of his utterances and the large number of prisoners of whom he was able to speak, this summary gave a stimulus to the study of the criminal throughout Europe. Thomson enumerated some of the physical characteristics of the instinctive criminal now generally recognised, pointed out the semi-imbecility prevalent among the juvenile criminals under his observation, the frequency of accumulated morbid appearances at post-mortem examinations, and the large proportion of cases at Perth needing treatment for mental diseases soon after admission, “apparently from congenital causes.” Thomson’s facts and opinions were too curtly, and, probably, too emphatically stated. Dr. Nicolson, writing also in the same journal from 1873 to 1875, dealt with the morbid psychology of the criminal, the unstable, emotional element in him, his proneness to delusions, his insensibility, and his weak-mindedness. Dr. Nicolson’s papers, all written before the latest and most fruitful era of criminal anthropology began, were, so far as I have been able to trace, the latest original contributions from the scientific side made in England to the study of the criminal. Such knowledge as has been furnished since has come from writers who have, almost of necessity, dealt with what may be called the mental and social symptomatology of criminals. Among the books which supply more or less valuable or interesting information of this kind may be mentioned the Rev. J. W. Horsley’s Jottings from Jail, Michael Davitt’s Leaves from a Prison Diary, and the Scenes from a Silent World, by a Prison Visitor, which appeared in Blackwood’s Magazine during 1889. An earlier book of this class, Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor (vol. iv.), is perhaps still the most valuable.

Italy is to-day the home of criminal anthropology, and not of criminal anthropology only, but of all the sciences that are connected with crime and the criminal; the Zanardelli criminal code, which has recently become law, while by no means entirely satisfactory from the scientific point of view, shows the influence of the new movement. In this respect Italy remains true to traditions that are two thousand years old; in the sixteenth century Italy was still the centre of studies in penal law, and, to keep to modern times, it is enough to mention the great names of Beccaria, and, still more recently, Romagnosi. It was under the auspices of Beltrani-Scalia, well known in connection with prison reform, that the earlier Italian studies in criminal anthropology were published, from 1870 onwards, in the Rivista delle discipline carcerarie, a journal which continues to publish valuable monographs. In this journal Lombroso published, in 1872, the results of some investigations which he had made on prisoners at Padua.

Professor Cesare Lombroso, of Turin, occupies a position of such importance in the development of criminal anthropology that it is necessary to have a clear idea of his aims and methods and the nature of his achievement. Born in 1836, of Venetian parentage, the various and restless activities of Lombroso’s career are characteristic of the man who has been all his life opening up new paths of investigation and enlarging the horizon of human knowledge. At the age of eleven he composed romances, poems, and tragedies in the manner of Alfieri; at twelve he developed a passion for classical antiquity, and published two small works on Roman archæology. At thirteen he was attracted to the study of sociology from a linguistic point of view (chiefly, we are told, with relation to Greek, Hebrew, Chinese, and Coptic); at the same time he was drawn to natural science, being interested especially in the formation of crystals, and before entering the University he had published two books of a somewhat evolutionary character. While a student he was led, by the combined study of ancient religions and of medicine, to the subject of mental diseases. He began with studies on cretinism in Lombardy and Liguria, his conclusions being afterwards adopted by Virchow and others. In the eventful year of 1859 he became first a soldier, and afterwards a military surgeon. In 1862 he was in charge of the department of mental diseases at Pavia University, and he initiated there an institution for the insane, a psychiatric museum, and a series of researches in the application of exact methods to the study of insanity. This last attempt was at the time received with general derision; it was said that he was studying madness with a yard measure; but his methods gradually made progress, and slowly met with general adoption. After this he made some important investigations into the causes of pellagra. Called to direct the asylum at Pesaro, he reformed it, and established a journal, written and managed by the insane. He then returned to Pavia, where he continued his psychiatric work, investigated the influence of atmospheric conditions on the mind, invented an instrument to measure pain, and engaged in a great number of studies, marked by extraordinary ingenuity, patience, and insight. Even as a youth Lombroso possessed the art of divining fruitful ideas, which at the time appeared absurd to scientific men as well as to the public. Every line of investigation he took up was at the time apparently opposed to the tendency of thought, and only received general attention at a later date. This was true, to some extent, even of the great achievement of his life.

In the year 1859—perhaps the most memorable of the century—Broca, who had a decided influence on Lombroso, had inaugurated the naturalist method of treating man with the Anthropological Society of Paris. The illuminating genius of Virchow, and his prodigious energy, which has done so much for anthropology and the methods of anthropology, also had its influence on the Italian, in some respects a kindred spirit. And Darwin’s Origin of Species, published in 1859, supplied, for the first time, an indispensable biological basis, and furnished that atavistic key of which Lombroso was tempted to make at first so much use, sometimes, it must be added, so much abuse. These circumstances combined to render possible, for the first time, the complete scientific treatment of the criminal man as a human variety, while Lombroso’s own manifold studies and various faculties had given him the best preparation for approaching this great task. It was in 1859 that he first conceived this task; L’Uomo Delinquente was not, however, finally published until 1876, while the second volume only appeared in 1889.

The influence of L’Uomo Delinquente in Italy, France, and Germany seems to have been as immediate and as decisive as that of The Origin of Species. Despine’s Psychologie Naturelle, the greatest work on the criminal that had appeared before Lombroso, was partial; the criminal was therein regarded purely as a psychological anomaly. Lombroso first perceived the criminal as, anatomically and physiologically, an organic anomaly. He set about weighing him and measuring him, according to the methods of anthropology. Even on the psychological side he gained new and more exact results. He went back to the origins of crime among plants and animals, among savages and children. He endeavoured to ascertain the place of the criminal in nature, his causes, and his treatment. Lombroso’s work is by no means free from faults. His style is abrupt; he is too impetuous, arriving too rapidly at conclusions, lacking in critical faculty and in balance. Thus he was led at the beginning to over-estimate the atavistic element in the criminal, and at a later date he has pressed too strongly the epileptic affinities of crime. His weaknesses have never been spared rough handling from friendly or unfriendly hands. Thus Mantegazza, while recognising his ingegno potentemente apostolico e geniale, denies that Lombroso possesses any of the qualities of a scientific investigator, and Dr. Napoleone Colajanni, who, from the socialistic left of the movement, has, in his Sociologia Criminale (1889-90) and elsewhere, bestowed much elaborate and often valuable criticism on the centre, compares Lombroso’s indiscriminate collection of facts to Charles IX.’s famous order on St. Bartholomew’s eve: “Kill them all; God will know His own.” But his work has been so rich, so laborious, so various; it has opened up so many new lines of investigation, and has suggested so many more, that it has everywhere been received as marking a new epoch. He was, as he has himself expressed it, the pollen-conveying insect, and the new science which he fecundated has grown with extraordinary rapidity. A continuous stream of studies—from books of the most comprehensive character down to investigations into minute points of criminal anatomy or physiology—is constantly pouring forth. It is still impossible to gather up this mass of investigation, often necessarily discordant, into more than a tentative whole, but its existence is sufficient to prove the vitality of the new science. It has of course met with fierce antagonism, and Lombroso himself has declared that perhaps not one stone will remain upon another, but that if this is to be the fate of his work, a better edifice will arise in its place.

Two other Italians must be mentioned with Lombroso. Enrico Ferri, Professor of Penal Law at Rome and a Deputy in the Italian Parliament, while doing valuable work as a criminal anthropologist, has at the same time studied the social bearings of criminality in his best-known book, Nuovi Orizzonti del Diritto. He has occupied himself less with the instinctive than with the occasional criminal, and his clear and philosophic spirit has placed him at the head of criminal sociologists. Garofalo, a Neapolitan lawyer, accepting generally the conclusions reached by Lombroso and Ferri, has become the most distinguished jurist of the movement, the pioneer in that reform of law through the methods of natural science which must eventually become so fruitful. His Criminologie (the new and enlarged edition is written in French) is marked by luminous yet careful generalisation, and it contains many suggestions of wise reform. Garofalo has brought into clear relief the inadequacy of legal maxims founded on antiquated and unscientific conceptions, and he has shown that not the nature of the crime, but the dangerousness (temibilità) of the criminal constitutes the only reasonable legal criterion to guide the inevitable social reaction against the criminal. This position is now generally accepted as the legitimate outcome of the scientific study of the criminal.

Among Italian workers in the department of criminal anthropology proper, a very high place belongs to Dr. Antonio Marro, formerly surgeon to the prison at Turin. I Caratteri dei Delinquenti (1887) contains the results of a carefully-detailed and methodic examination of more than five hundred prisoners, men and women, and of over one hundred normal persons together with an investigation into their ancestry and habits. All the data are presented in tabular form, and his excellent methods and judicious moderation in drawing conclusions impart great value to his work. His exactness and impartiality have been admired even by those whose instincts and training have led them to dread the invasions of this department of science. Dr. Marro has made interesting contributions to the differentiation of various criminal types, and he has brought out very clearly the disastrous tendency to degeneration among the children of parents who have passed middle age. Other Italian studies, among many that might be mentioned, are Virgilio’s, dating from 1874, Dr. P. Penta’s elaborate studies, the various works of Zuccarelli, the energetic Neapolitan professor and editor of L’Anomalo, V. Rossi’s work, Studio sopra una Centuria di Criminali, Salsotto’s on women delinquents, and Ottolenghi’s investigations into the senses of criminals. The Archivio di Psichiatria, a rich storehouse of elaborate observations, founded in 1880, directed by Lombroso, Ferri, Garofalo, and Morselli, edited by Rossi and Ottolenghi, remains at the head of journals of criminal anthropology.

The first suggestion of an international congress of criminal anthropology arose in Italy, and dates from the year 1882, when Salvatore Tommasi published an important article in the Rassegna Critica. The first congress, that of Rome, was not, however, actually held until 1885. It was attended by all the most distinguished criminal anthropologists, criminal sociologists, and jurists of the “positive” school, chiefly Italian, French, and German, and its Actes are of great interest. The second international congress was held in August 1889, in Paris. It was of a more cosmopolitan character than the first, and of even greater interest.

France has always been a laboratory for the popularisation of great ideas, and Tarde’s La Criminalité Comparée is among the best of such attempts. M. Tarde is a juge d’instruction, not an alienist or an anthropologist; he touches on all the various problems of crime with ever-ready intelligence and acuteness, and a rare charm of literary style, illuminating with suggestive criticism everything that he touches. This easily accessible little volume of the Libraire de Philosophie Contemporaine is the most comprehensive introduction for those who would go down to the città dolente by a rose-strewn path. Lacassagne, the eminent medico-legal expert of Lyons, and editor of the valuable Archives de l’Anthropologie Criminelle, stands perhaps at the head of French criminal anthropologists, although beyond his monograph, Les Tatouages, he has published little. The judicial qualities of his mind, and his power of expressing just and large conceptions in felicitous and memorable phrases, impart value to all that he writes, and his forthcoming work on the criminal man will, it is probable, for all practical purposes, supersede other works. De la Criminalité chez les Arabes, by A. Kocher, a pupil of Lacassagne’s, is a book of great interest, and the names of Manouvrier, Bournet, Corre, Laurent, etc., are well known in connection with criminal anthropology in France, while Féré ably represents the French school which explains criminality by degeneration alone.

In Germany the serious study of the criminal may be said to have begun with Krafft-Ebing, the distinguished professor of psychiatry, now at Vienna, who, by laying down clearly in his Grundzuge der Kriminal Psychologie (1872), and other works, the doctrine of a criminal psychosis, and pointing out its practical results, deserves, as Krauss remarks, to be regarded as an important precursor of Lombroso. Knecht studied over 1200 prisoners anthropologically. Dr. A. Krauss, who began with investigations into criminal psychology, has since done much solid work in criminal anthropology. Flesch made important observations on the morbid pathology of criminals; Benedikt, known in connection with various interesting investigations in criminal anthropology, began in 1879 with a remarkable study of the criminal brain, in which he observed frequent confluence of the fissures, as among some lower races, and also an additional convolution in the frontal lobe, which he assimilated to that of the carnivora. His conclusions in this difficult field of research were, however, considerably shaken by Professor Giacomini, of Turin, and others, who showed that similar anomalies are found, although not so frequently, in normal persons. The brilliant Viennese professor has in his recently-published Kraniometrie und Kephalometrie shown himself the most original and suggestive of living students of the architecture of the skull.

In Holland, Professor Van Hamel, of Amsterdam, represents the new spirit of approaching the problems of criminality.

In Belgium, where Quetelet’s great work, Physique Sociale, inaugurated criminal sociology, and where prison reform, which has always attracted much attention, is now ably represented by Professor Adolphe Prins, the results of criminal anthropology have been received and discussed with interest and sympathy, and various researches have been carried on. Professor Héger and Dr. Semal of Mons should also be named here. In 1884 the Anthropological Society of Belgium nominated a commission for the investigation of criminal anthropology. This led to various interesting researches, none of them, however, of great importance.

In Spain and Portugal criminal anthropology is being prosecuted with much zeal. Among its chief representatives may be named especially Vera and Rafael Salillas (whose interesting book, La Vida Penal en España, gives a very vivid picture of life in the Spanish prisons), and at Lisbon Bernardo Lucas. D’Azevedo Castello Branco, sub-director of Lisbon prison, should also be mentioned. In 1889, at a congress held in Lisbon, the relation of criminal anthropology to penality, legal reform, and allied problems was fully discussed.

In the rapidly-developing Spanish countries of South America, especially in the Argentine Republic, criminal anthropology seems to be making great progress. It is officially taught at the University of Buenos Ayres. Luis del Drago, a judge in the Argentine Republic, with his Los hombres de Presa (1888), an able study of criminality, which has rapidly reached a second edition, thus showing the interest generally felt in these studies, and some other workers, witness to the progress made in this country. On the initiative of Dr. del Drago, with influential coadjutors, a society for the promotion of criminal anthropology was founded in Buenos Ayres in 1888, “to study the person of the criminal, to establish the degree of his dangerousness and of his responsibility, and to effect the gradual and progressive reform of penal law in accordance with the principles of the new school.” In Brazil Professor Viejra de Aranjo of Pernambuco is the chief representative of the science.

In Russia and Poland, although the study of criminal anthropology dates from very recent years, it is making considerable progress. Bielakoff, in the Archives of Psichiatry of Kharkoff, studied 100 homicides. Professor Troizki, of Warsaw, published a careful study of 350 prisoners. Dr. Prascovia Tarnowskaia examined 100 female thieves, whom she compared with 150 prostitutes and 100 peasant women. On the legal side, Dimitri Drill is engaged on a great work, of which one volume only is published at present, in which he deals thoroughly with the organic factors of crime, and with the social applications of criminal anthropology. The Russians seem to be characteristically audacious in their applications of the new science, and there is in Russia a feeling, not merely against imprisoning criminals, but even against secluding them. In 1885 a young girl assassinated a Jewish child to obtain possession for her lover of the money of the child’s father, a rich usurer. Professor Babinski declared that she was not mad, but entirely devoid of moral notions, that she was incurable, and that it would be quite useless (useless, that is, from a medical point of view) to put her in an asylum. She was acquitted.

In Great Britain alone during the last fifteen years there is no scientific work in criminal anthropology to be recorded. When Dr. Coutagne inaugurated, in 1888, a “Chronique Anglaise” in the Archives de l’Anthropologie Criminelle, he could not conceal his embarrassment. While the Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Russian summaries are founded on a large series of works in criminal anthropology, in England there is absolutely no centre for the scientific study of criminality. “Legal medicine,” he remarks, “has there inspired no special publication, nor any learned society. At the International Medical Congress of London, in 1881, although so remarkably organised, it was less well treated than laryngology or dentistry, and formed the object of no section, state medicine being almost synonymous with hygiene. If we consult the scientific journals of England dealing with allied subjects, our baggage will receive very few additions.” In 1889 the International Association of Criminal Law was founded by Professor G. A. Van Hamel of Amsterdam, Professor Fr. von Liszt of Marburg, and Professor Adolphe Prins of Brussels. This association, which has a great future before it, represents, from the scientific and practical standpoint, the movement of reform in matters that relate to the criminal. It maintains that criminality and the repression of crime must be regarded as much from the social as from the legal point of view. It endeavours to establish this principle and its consequences in the science of criminal law as well as in penal legislation. The association already numbers between three and four hundred members, and includes well-known representatives from twenty-one different countries in Europe and America. England is among the least well represented of all; the English members rank in number with the Portuguese, Servian, and Argentine members. Germany is more than twenty times better represented. No interest was felt in England in the International Congress of Criminal Anthropology recently held in Paris. At this Congress official delegates came from all parts of the civilised world, from Russia to Hawaii, but although there were two from the United States, there was not one from Great Britain. When some twelve months since I issued a series of Questions, dealing with some of the main points in the investigation of the criminal, to the medical officers of the larger prisons in Great Britain and Ireland, the answers that I received, while sometimes of much interest—and I am indebted to my correspondents for their anxiety to answer to the best of their ability—were amply sufficient to show that criminal anthropology as an exact science is yet unknown in England. Some of my correspondents, I fear, had not so much as heard whether there be a criminal anthropology. England has, however, in the past been a home of studies connected with the condition of the criminal. The centenary of John Howard, which we have lately celebrated, is a brilliant witness to this fact. Fifty years ago Englishmen sought to distinguish themselves by the invention of patent improved tread-mills and similar now antiquated devices to benefit the criminal. We began zealously with the therapeutics of crime; it is now time to study the criminal’s symptomatology, his diagnosis, his pathology, and it is scarcely possible to imagine that in these studies England will long continue to lag so far behind the rest of the civilised world.

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