ENRICO FERRI ON HOMICIDE. 835 



that "in delinquents murder is a means, in madmen it is an 

 end," adopted until now by most scientists, and only lately dis- 

 missed as inadequate by the most eminent anthropologists and 

 criminalists in consequence of Ferri's criticisms published in 

 1886. 



In the present book the author adds two other characteristic 

 motive factors found in mad delinquents that is to say, homi- 

 cide for purpose of suicide (for example, a man kills another in 

 order to expiate his crime on the scaffold) ; and sacrificial homi- 

 cide induced by the desire to kill, to sacrifice a victim for his own 

 good or for the good of both murderer and victim. This, accord- 

 ing to Ferri, is the attitude of the insane homicide before, during, 

 and after his criminal excitement. First, and less common, there 

 is the premeditation which approximates the insane homicide to 

 the homicide born. The concomitants of this type may be the 

 killing of his victim openly in the face of witnesses, the lack of 

 accomplices, the latter an important feature and one that the mad 

 homicide has almost always in common with the murderer by 

 passionate impulse. It is not, however, unknown that madmen 

 associate to commit crimes, from the sociability that is a charac- 

 teristic of the epileptic, and forms indeed yet another proof of 

 the fundamental identity of epilepsy and congenital delinquency 

 with so-called moral insanity, so wonderfully demonstrated by 

 Lombroso. 



While committing the crime the manner of the mad homicide 

 is generally agitated. He is also of a violent ferocity, which dif- 

 fers from that of the born homicide, which may lead him to the 

 point of cannibalism, just as it does the latter. Another symp- 

 tom, which is, however, exclusively seen in the insane (imbeciles, 

 idiots, epileptics), is that of the monstrous sexual passion that 

 finds its vent on the corpse of their victim (necro-philomania), to 

 which must be added the murder of persons beloved or of persons 

 unknown, as well as indiscriminate massacre. 



The symptoms and the attitude of the mad homicide after his 

 crime are in part common to those of the born homicide, although 

 the psychological genesis of these symptoms is different. These 

 are: calmness after committing the act, which often continues 

 when arrested and during the trial, impassibility at sight of the 

 corpse, etc. A true characteristic symptom distinguishing the 

 mad homicide from the born homicide is great prostration and 

 abnormal sleep into which he often falls after his murderous 

 assault, very different from the calmness and the placid sleep of 

 the born homicide. Notable, too, is the impulse toward suicide 

 that seizes him immediately after the consummaticn of the deed, 

 an instantaneous reaction of his moral sense, the feeling of relief, 

 as though a heavy weight were removed, the moral Daltonism 



