CRIMINAL ANTHROPOLOGY. 645 



The sentiments qf these individuals not only are closed against every 

 civilizing action which educative objects commonly exercise, but the 

 presence of these civilizing influences in the world, and in society or in 

 the family, excites their opposition. They repulse with great efforts their 

 educators and teachers when they would direct them toward their moral 

 teaching, the object of the educators beiugto prevent this development 

 of antagonism to the laws of society. The efforts even of the educators 

 and teachers to prevent this opposition itself begets an opposition and 

 increases the antagonism of the scholar. The inaptitude for education 

 on the part of the individual arises because of a natural and irremediable 

 defect or a physiologic inaptitude to the social laws of the family that 

 one observes among some children, sometimes without regard to their 

 life or surroundings, education, or example. This constitutes their pre- 

 disposition to crime, and thus has grown up the saying used by many 

 Ijeople without knowing that it is true science, sometimes expressed 

 concerning an incorrigible infant, '•^Gejils est ne pour la guillotine,^' " He 

 was born to be hung." 



Dr. Magnan, the head of the insane asylum at Sainte-Anne, Paris, 

 was a joint reporter with Monsieur Taverni upon the foregoing ques- 

 tion. Dr. Magnan differed largely from Taverni. He said the question 

 as thus presented seems to admit as an accepted fact an infantile pre- 

 disposition to crime. That, he said, is an assertion maintained by many 

 criminalists, but one to which he refused his adhesion. He said that 

 the opinion that attributes to the most of the criminals an ancestral 

 origin, which considers the criminal born and raised as a savage sur- 

 viving our present actual civilization, which contends that the infant 

 criminality is only a prolonged example of savagery ; — this opinion, he 

 says, has always broughtforth contradictions, and he cites certain recent 

 publications : 



Tarde, "La criminalite comparee," Paris, 1886. Topinard, "Uan- 

 thropologie criminelle — Revue d'anthropologie. No. 6," November, 1887. 

 Ch. F^re, " Degenerescence et criminalite," Paris, 1888. H. Joly, " Le 

 crime, Etude sociale," Paris, 1888. 



Continuing his discussion concerning this supposed predisposition to 

 crime, he asked, " Can any one dare to say that there are primordial 

 forms of crime and that they, with the germs of crime, are natural attri- 

 butes; in other terms, that the infant is naturally disposed to crime 

 and that the criminal is a man deprived of moral sense?" We think 

 this to be an erroneous determination of observed phenomena. 



At the moment of birth and for some days after, the infant has noth- 

 ing more than a vegetative life. It cama into the world where it has to 

 live finding itself surrounded by elements which conflict with its organ- 

 ism and provoke re action. These are only the instinctive expressions 

 of its emotions. All acts of the respiratory, circulatory, digestive, and 

 other organs are a reflex order and do not demand the intervention of 

 either mind or brain ; mere life is sufficient for their accomplishment 



