658 CEIMINAL ANTHROPOLOGY. 



A classificatiou of the penal code might make no differeuces between 

 these offeuses, while authropologic aud psychologic iuvestigatious would 

 have to tak^ account of them. 



In Older to place a criminal in the degenerate classes of monstrous 

 criminals it is necessary that he should exhibit an innate or instinctive 

 cruelty, such as is found in certain savage peoples. In that case the 

 murder is committed with a purely egotistic aim, that is to say, that 

 the criminal has been moved by a desire of some individual satisfac- 

 tion J when there has been on the part of the victim an absence of what 

 would constitute provocation on the part of a normal man; when the 

 murder has been accompanied by brutality made with intent to prolong 

 the agony, that it may give pleasure to the fiendish character of the 

 criminal. It is in these terrible crimes, by which the monstrous nature 

 of the criminal is to be recognized. After this be once established there 

 is still to distinguish between the born assassin aud the insane or 

 epileptic individual, who is either impelled by an imaginary superior 

 force or else from want of perception of the nature of crime is held to 

 be not responsible. 



(2) The cases cited are confessed to be of extreme anomaly. Some- 

 times the circumstances themselves iu which the crime has been com- 

 mitted are sufficient to show the nature of the criminal. In cases 

 where this is in doubt and it is desired to determine to which class he 

 belongs, there should be the examination psychologic and authropo- 

 logic. The anthropologic characters are of an importance and often- 

 times decisive when taken from the diagnosis of infants or young crim- 

 inals. There are those who are recognized as having this taint of born 

 criminality by their light offenses, their fighting, lying, cruelty, wan- 

 tonness, truancy, theft, etc., and those bad boys, incorrigible young- 

 sters, always doing things not simply mischievous, but things which 

 they know to be wrong, though they may not be high crimes. But 

 these individuals, being examined by anthropology, may present at the 

 same time the characters of moral insanity and of innate criminality. 

 The sanguinary instinct manifests itself frequently from the first in- 

 fancy by a series of acts just described as slight offenses, but which are 

 unjustifiable, frequently repeated, yet of which the parent or teacher 

 iu authority takes no notice, because of the youth or feebleness of the 

 child. Arrived at manhood, when he has finished his evil career by 

 assassination, murder, and the higher crimes, then is remembered these 

 minor offenses in his infancy which were the fore-runners of graver and 

 more hideous crimes. In these and similar cases one can find the typ- 

 ical physiognomy of the assassin, the cold regard, the fixed eye, the 

 marked cranial deformation, an excessive length of the lower part of the 

 face, the forehead narrow and retreating, and other regressive signs; 

 or, perhaps, such atypic anomalies as plaf/iocephaU/ and scaphocephaly 

 and among those who commit rape the thickness aud grossuess of the 



