398 HUMAN BIOLOGY 



No Students of conduct deviations can afford to forget 

 that very many mental defectives have sound and wholesome 

 character traits, the result of good upbringing. On the other 

 hand, we have to recognize that in instances of abnormal 

 personahty, arising as the result of anyone of the several 

 biological causes mentioned, the influence of attempts at 

 educative control are often very slight indeed. Our own 

 experience with treatment of individual cases shows this, 

 and the careful regime undertaken for a group of post- 

 encephalitic conduct disorder cases at the Pennsylvania 

 Hospital also proves it. 



The part that mental disease as ordinarily spoken of 

 plays in criminality is, statistically considered, not great. 

 But the borderline between abnormal personality and mental 

 disease is not easy to draw, and psychiatry has not yet 

 entered into enough researches on personality problems 

 to have said its last word on the subject. Some of the most 

 notorious murder trials have centered about this question 

 of what constitutes mental disease; the problem sometimes 

 has arisen because of the vague but obvious mental or 

 personality abnormality of the murderer. Coming under 

 the head of the ordinary groupings of the psychoses, there 

 are comparatively few inmates of penal institutions, and 

 almost none among those in juvenile correctional schools. 



Our own years of study in the field of conduct disorders 

 have led me and my co-workers to perceive very plainly 

 that if we are to discuss at all the relationship of the biologi- 

 cal make-up of individuals to their conduct tendencies, 

 we must include not only inferiorities, weaknesses, and 

 degeneracies, but also superiorities of physical structure 

 and deviations from the norm in the way of overdevelop- 

 ment and physical precocity. A very real cause of "breaking 

 over the traces" socially and committing offenses, in our 

 particular era, is to be found in unusual and premature 

 general strength and development, as well as more rarely 

 in unusually early sex maturity which may or may not 

 accompany precocious or unusual general structural develop- 

 ment. Anent this, we may cite the fact, well known by this 

 time, that girls appearing in the juvenile court for sex 

 offenses tend to be larger for their age than the norm. 



