Go2 CRIMINAL ANTHROPOLOGY. 



jicter. The role of ptomaines in criminal manifestations appeared to 

 him certain. 



M. Tarde responded to Lombroso apropos of the criminal woman. 

 He maintained that an honest woman j^resented the characteristics 

 ascribed to the criminal woman as described by the Italian school, and 

 nevertlieless, woman is less criminal, or takes to crime less than man. 

 Prostitution is the occasion and not the oftense. He declared there 

 were no anatomic characters proper or peculiar to the criminal, and, 

 nevertheless, there were organic and physiologic predispositions to 

 crime. The function made the organ, and the nerve would model the 

 bone; as the river determines the valley, so the crime makes the crimi- 

 nal. If in criminal anthropology one can come to show the localization 

 of criminal characteristics, as has done Broca for the articulate language, 

 the base of the scientific edifice might be considered established. 



M. Moleschott and Dr. Brouardel complimented these gentlemen 

 upon the i)ro found ness of their studies. The latter considered the 

 search for the criminal anomaly in physical or anatomical character- 

 istics as illusory. He could admit the malformations of the pavillion 

 of the ear reported by Morel, the occipital fossette and the characters 

 of the same kind, but these were no cause of criminality in tliemselves, 

 but only simple indexes of an abnormal development of which the con- 

 sequences could be many. The epileptics, the insane, show the presence 

 of ptomaines in their urine. He recalled the observations of an epilep- 

 tic woman in his service. Her urine contained a convulsive ptomaine, 

 which injected into a frog produced the same physiologic effects as 

 strychnine. The ptomanic ])roducts or the leucomanic toxique found 

 in the veins of the insane and the melancholy result from troubles in 

 general nutrition. Are they cause or are they effect'? The question 

 demands to be studied. 



Dr. Brouardel responded to M. Tarde that if the function made the 

 organ, it could oidy do so in the presence of nuiscular fiber. A woman 

 without any calf to her leg could never become a dancer. 



M. Bajenoff, director of the Asylum of Riazanne, Russia, could not 

 accept everything he had found in the works of Lombroso and his col- 

 leagues, but his and their methods seemed to be scientific. His own 

 studies cephalometric had shown to him that honest men had a larger 

 frontal development, while the criminals were better developed in the 

 parietal and occipital portions of their brain or skull. 



l>aron Garofalo said that crime might be considered always the 

 result of an organic anomaly. In si)eaking of crimes we should con- 

 sider only those which were declared so by the i)ublic conscience and 

 not always those declared so by the law. Those, for instance, of great 

 cruelty or extraordinary improbity. But one could perceive that 

 criminals always manifested moral anomalies and physical anomalies 

 that were found less frequently in honest men. 



Lombroso insisted upon his fundamental distinction between the 



