CRIMINAL ANTHROPOLOGY IN ITALY. 743 



CRIMINAL ANTHROPOLOGY IN ITALY. 



By HELEN ZIMMERN. 



"Enemy" ye shall say, but not " wicked one" ; "diseased one" ye shall say, but not 

 " wretch " ; " fool " ye shall say, but not " sinner."— F. Nietzsche. 



IF we were asked to name in what particular Italy stands to-day 

 quite head and shoulders above her fellows, we should unhesi- 

 tatingly say in the science of criminal anthropology. This is an 

 essentially Italian study, whose origin we discover as early as 1320, 

 when the King of the Two Sicilies decreed that no one should be 

 permitted to practice medicine who had not studied anatomy for at 

 least one year. After this, in the fourteenth century, we find men 

 who devoted themselves to the study of skulls, thus laying the basis 

 of the science of craniology. It was Italians, therefore, who initi- 

 ated this science, and to Italy has been reserved the proud place of 

 bringing it to its high development in the nineteenth century, even 

 though the discoveries of Darwin, which gave it a fresh impetus, 

 date from England. Beyond question the peninsula is at the head 

 and front of all studies connected with criminal anthropology, and 

 not of criminal anthropology only, but of all cognate sciences con- 

 nected with crime and the criminal. 



To the Italians belongs the merit of reviving the study of a ques- 

 tion with which philosophy, law, and medicine have always been oc- 

 cupied. It has been well remarked that whenever philosophical stud- 

 ies have free expansion, that whenever the desire to safeguard society, 

 the spirit of toleration, the methods of ameliorating the fate of the 

 guilty, have been studied by thinkers, their conceptions have eventu- 

 ally conquered public opinion. It is to the glory of Italy, the land 

 where Roman law, the foundation of modern law, was born, that it 

 has again put into the crucible this problem of criminality, and that 

 it has proceeded to the study of this problem by the only truly scien- 

 tific method — namely, that of studying the psychology of criminals 

 and their pathological abnormities. It will be its distinction to have 

 declared against illusory enthusiasms, and to have founded a science 

 which will contribute to the more efficacious protection of society. 

 The recognized chief of this Italian school is Prof. Cesare Lom- 

 broso, of Turin, who has illustrated his theories by a number of 

 remarkably able and interesting books. Until quite recently, to the 

 world at large, the criminal figured as of the Bill Sykes type — and 

 who, reading Oliver Twist, has not shrunk with horror on perusing 

 the intimate drama of the ruffian's mind after the brutal murder of 

 the faithful Nancy? These things move us as the highest efforts of 

 Dickens's imagination. Bill Sykes was written in prescientific days. 



