CRIMINAL ANTHROPOLOGY. 639 



while on the other hai\d the augmentation of crimes against the person, 

 whether those of blood or against morality, during the warm or summer 

 months. The reason for these things is that we find the individuals 

 affected, to be in that biologic condition wherein they have the least 

 resistance against these evil influences. 



The limits of this paper do not permit the proofs, whether anthro- 

 pologic, psychologic, or statistic, of these conclusions, but these are 

 only the synthesis of numerous studies and positive investigation made 

 upon the tendency or inducement to crime, by observing the crimi- 

 nals and the causes which afiect them. It has been said that for 

 certain crimes and criminals the largest influence ought to be recog- 

 nized or accorded to the physio-psychic conditions of the individual, 

 which may go from the anthropologic anomaly, scarcely recognizable, 

 to the pathologic state, the most accentuated, yet this does not exclude 

 the possible fact that crime may be a consequence of social con- 

 dition; that the physio-psychic anomalies of the individual are nothing 

 but the effect of a deleterio'us'social environment which condemns those 

 which it surrounds to an organic and psychic degeneration. This ob- 

 jection might be good when taken in a relative sense, but is without 

 foundation if one seeks to give it an absolute value. 



First, it is necessary to remember that cause and effect are them- 

 selves only relative, for each effect is in its turn a cause and vice versa; 

 so that if misery, poverty, degradation, etc., whether material or moral, 

 is a cause of degeneration, the degeneration becomes in its turn a cause 

 of the misery, poverty, and degradation. And so the discussion be- 

 comes metaphysical. Investigators into the relations of crime in differ- 

 ent countries (criminal geographers) have claimed a great value for 

 their statistics when they have given the quality of the crime and the 

 number of the criminals in various countries or provinces, and sought 

 to compare one with the other. Instead of these being the differences 

 in biologic condition, as of race; or of physical conditions, as of climate, 

 etc.; they may be governed largely by social or eijonomic conditions; 

 that is, those arising from thedilferencesin agriculture, industry, labor, 

 wages, homes, schools, service in the army, etc. 



In the absence of any positive verification, the student of this ques- 

 tion may with propriety ask if the social conditions of a given province 

 or country have any real effect upon or relation to its criminality, and 

 whether the social conditions may not be themselves only the effect of 

 the ethnic characters of intelligence, energy, etc., of its inhabitants and 

 the conditions of its climate, soil, etc. 



But with more precision one can also aver, even outside the conditions 

 profoundly pathologic, that there are a great number of cases in which 

 the bio-psychic anomalies of the criminals may be the effect of an envi- 

 ronment which is i^hysically and morally mephitic. 



In each family of several children, in spite of the same surroundings 

 and like favorable conditions, with the same methods of instruction and 



