CRIME AND INSANITY 



and collateral relatives who are diseased in mind or nerves, 

 but also neuropathic, insane, even idiotic offspring. 



" These problematic beings, who mostly from their child- 

 hood feel, think, and act differently from other people, are 

 also themselves in constant danger of becoming insane, and 

 are often candidates for a degenerate form of true insanity 

 namely, primary madness, to which also their offspring are 

 more particularly liable. 



" (e) That criminal and vicious habits of life l stand in 

 hereditary relation to insanity is proved by the frequency 

 with which insanity and other neurotic degenerations occur 

 in habitual criminals themselves and in their blood-relations, 

 their ascendants and descendants. The contrast nevertheless 

 remains between crime as a moral and insanity as an organic 

 degeneration. The point of contact of the two lies simply in 

 the fact that insanity may show itself under the clinical form 

 of moral depravity (see moral insanity), and is frequently 

 falsely taken for the latter. The passion for drink must also 

 be included in the series of factors having a hereditary in- 

 fluence. In this case homogeneous inheritance seldom occurs, 

 usually heterogeneous ; the parents who have degenerated in 

 consequence of excesses in alcohol give life to children who 

 come into the world idiotic or hydrocephalous or with neuro- 

 pathic convulsive constitutions, who soon perish of convul- 

 sions, while among those who survive, epilepsy, hysteria, 

 mental diseases, and, in fact, the worst forms of psychical 

 degeneration, develop from the morbid constitution of the 

 nerve centres. 



"Thus Marc^ records the case of a drunkard who had 



1 Roller, Allg. Zeitsckr. f. Psych, i. p. 616 ; Heinrich, ibid. 5, p. 538 ; 

 Solbrig, Verbrechen und Wahnsinn, 1867 ; Legrand du Saulle, Ann. d'Hyg. 

 October 1868 ; Despine, fitude sur les Facultes Intellect, et Morales, Paris, 1868 ; 

 Lay cock, Journal of Mental Science, October 1868 ; Brierre, Les Fous Criminels 

 de VAngleterre, German by Stark, 1870 ; Thomson, Journ. of Mental Science, 

 October 1870. 



