744 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



It is instructive to turn from him, and the class of melodramatic ruf- 

 fians of whom he is but an example, to the criminals dispassionately 

 laid bare in mental, moral, and physical dissection by Lombroso and 

 his fellow-workers. Certainly no such type as Bill Sykes, a projected 

 image of the novelist's brains, coinciding with a highly strung 

 nervous system, is to be found in the gallery of habitual malefactors 

 presented to us in the Uomo Delinquente and other books. Habitual 

 malefactors, according to Italian students, are a class apart from 

 other men, a distinct species of " genus Homo sapiens," must be 

 judged by special standards, and must by no means be informed with 

 the feelings of normal men. Herein consists the fundamental basis 

 of the new science of criminal anthropology — a science which bids 

 fair, in spite of conservative and clerical opposition and even of 

 ignorant ridicule, to modify profoundly our present manner of con- 

 sidering and treating these enemies and pests of society. 



" Criminal anthropology," says Signor Sergi, one of the ablest 

 exponents of the new system, " studies the delinquent in his natural 

 place — that is to say, in the field of biology and pathology. But it 

 does not for that reason put him outside the society in which his 

 criminal manifestations occur, for it considers human society as a 

 natural biological fact, outside of which man does not and can not 

 live. As normal anthropology, like other biological sciences, studies 

 and observes the individual in his natural milieu, and finds that this 

 milieu is double, physical and organic, and under this double aspect 

 sees him develop and act, so criminal anthropology does the same with 

 the very limited and specialized aim of discovering the nature and 

 origin of the phenomenon of crime. Every phenomenon, however, 

 remains inexplicable if it be examined alone; the explanation is 

 easier if it be studied in the complex of phenomena developed in 

 the double physical and social milieu of which we have spoken." 



Words such as these, where we find embryology, physiology, 

 anatomy, chemistry, and statistics, invoked as aids to the origin of 

 crime, place us at the antipodes of ancient philosophies; yet Lom- 

 broso and his school are in reality acting on the old-world notion 

 embodied by Horace in his " mens sana in corpore sanoP The 

 delinquent, they argue, acts abnormally. Acts being the visible 

 results of functions performed by the brain and reflective nervous 

 system, it follows that these functions are abnormal. The functions 

 being abnormal, the organs which perform them must be either 

 abnormal or troubled in their action by the habitual or accidental 

 interference of disturbing causes, for no normal organ acting under 

 normal conditions can perform abnormal functions. The founders 

 of this new school, therefore, dedicate themselves first of all to the 

 study of the skull, brain, and nervous system of the criminals; then 



