652 CRIMINAL ANTHROPOLOGY. 



of the ediicatiou of these unfortunates, aud to organize a school of in- 

 dustry where they would be taught proper trades, which trades, he 

 said, couhl easily be arranged for what is known in commerce as the 

 '' articles de Paris," and the needed knowledge taught to the abandoned 

 and illiterate child. He gave as his opinion that this was the duty of 

 the State to provide and care for these children and to so rear them as 

 they should become honest, respectable, aud industrious men and 

 women instead of the ignorant, illiterate, degenerate criminals, to be- 

 come which they were now on the high road. 



This report gave rise to a great discussion. MM. Motet, Dalifol, Eous- 

 sel, aud Herbette deplored the condition of the law that placed in the 

 houses of correction — children at an age from 10 to 15 years. If not 

 already criminals, they soon become perverted and ready to become 

 criminals. A more humanitarian law would have sent them to school 

 aud to church. 



Lombroso said that the perverse instinct of human nature appears 

 even in the first years of the life of the infant. The infant in his first 

 months is likely to be vain, proud, selfish, cruel, without moral sense, 

 without honesty or truth, without knowledge or care for the rights of 

 others, and without affection; and this, said he, is a cnmiual embry- 

 onnaire. He thanked Dr. Magnan for having explained many ob- 

 scure things found in Meynert. Lombroso explained the origin of 

 his studies upon the criminality of infants, and said he had done 

 nothing else than to copy the observers Perez, Spencer, and Tain. In 

 the cases submitted by Dr. Magnan which he had described and many 

 more of which he had exhibited the photographs, Lombroso declared 

 that he could recognize in them tlie physical characteristics of true 

 criminals. Those which Dr. Magnan declared to be the evidences of a 

 general paralysis, were to his (Lombroso's) mind naught but those of 

 the criminal born. He could see in the degenerates the criminal epi- 

 leptic, the imbecile, with their stigmas each peculiar to itself. Of the 

 seventy-eight photographs in Dr. Bronardel's album he had found but 

 two who had not the criminal traits. 



MM. Moleschott and Van Hamel came to tlie defense of the infant 

 aud invoked its inability of discernment. They declared there were no 

 such things as innate ideas, nor yet was there either criminality or 

 virtue innate. The infant was born unconscious of either. In its early 

 infancy it is not chaste because it is uuconscious of shame. It has no 

 respect for the truth, because it does not know the difference between 

 the truth and a lie. The instinct of destruction is very strong, and it 

 destroys with pleasure and satisfaction, M. Molescliott called to mind 

 a trick of Goethe, recounted by himself, in which he described his de- 

 light in a scene in his infancy when in the absence of his mother he 

 committed an absolute carnage among the glass and pottery ware. But 

 the sentiment of honesty aud virtue and truth developed with age. 

 It is the law of evolution, but it is necessary that we do not confound 

 this phase of evolution with physiologic malady or with criminality. 



