(342 CRIMINAL ANTHROPOLOGY. 



criminal, and find if there be any anomalies wliich would authorize 

 the idea of a degradation or physical degeneration predominating 

 among that class of men. This problem remains yet an object of 

 stndy. The results which have come to ns up to the present are not 

 conclusive. Among those who make these studies, some have observed 

 too small a number of cases, and others have occupied themselves 

 solely upon the cranial anomalies without interesting themselves with 

 the anomalies of the brain, or vice versa, and the researches have not 

 always been exempt from influence or conception a priori. They have 

 supposed their task to be to establish imaginary relations between par- 

 ticular dispositions, altogether accidental, of the cerebral convolutions 

 of criminals, and certain normal dispositions of the same convolu- 

 tions among other persons. The observers have been rare who have 

 sought among criminals for the peculiarities which the surface of the 

 cerebral hemispheres present, and their relation with the type of skull 

 corresi)onding, and whether these things are or not the same which the 

 anatomist has already found to exist among individuals not criminals. 

 Nevertheless, the observation of several scientific anatomists appear to 

 affirm that there does not exist any special type of skull or of brain in 

 criminals, and this invites us to consider whether there exists any nor- 

 mal type of skull or brain of non-criminals, honest men. 



In the skull and brain of criminals the degenerate characters appear 

 with greater frequency than in those not criminals. But the precise 

 value of this comparative frequency is yet insufficiently determined as 

 well as the manner in which these degenerative characters are proven, 

 so that their full power to cause crim^ or to create a pre-dispositiou to 

 crime, does not appear as yet established by any law that can be called 

 invariable. No order of somatic anomaly encountered among crimi- 

 nals possesses by itself any signification of a material cause of the delin- 

 quency nor a physical pre-disposition to delinquency. Taken together 

 they indicate only the existence of, (I) a degeneration, (2) an organism 

 by which their development has been arrested, or (3) the return of a 

 regressive atavism. 



But the physical degradation which is recognized by every fact can 

 not, according to our experience, be found separated from a moral deg- 

 radation. Observation has taught us that the brain sous-niicrocephalic 

 is perhaps not apt in its function to conceive principles of which the 

 presence in the understanding is a force necessary to the existence of 

 moral life. So that we have learned that a human skull which recalls 

 by its structure the animal form which it resembles, approaches more 

 to the ancestral form than another in which the archaic forms have 

 been effaced. 



The moral degradation which physical degradation teaches, belongs 

 exclusively to the general operation of the moral life. We do not pos- 

 sess sufficient experimental knowledge of the anatomic structure of 

 any individual to enable us to say, from this, that he had any determin- 

 ing tendency towards crime, nor that it had in. any way a bearing upon 



