A STUDY OF LUIGI LUCCHENI. 203 



sonality provoked by their disease. In one, as I have shown in 

 L'Uomo Delinquente, they write signatures that cover a whole page 

 in their larger diameter, while the signature in the normal state is 

 often smaller than the average (see Fig. 3). 



The same double personality that is apparent in the writing is 

 attested in the psychology. We have seen that Luccheni was kind 

 to children, that he was a good servant, characteristics quite opposed 

 to the anarchistic nature, and a genial companion; a man who in 

 Africa was enthusiastically fond of military life; who, a little while 

 before, when he was in the service of the captain, had expressed ex- 

 treme monarchical sentiments; and finally, when he had become an 

 anarchist, again asked his master to be restored to his service. This 

 double personality is another of the essential characteristics of hysteria 

 and epilepsy. 



I have recently studied an epileptoid degenerate who has a sound 

 mind, and, at least in his normal state, is quiet and gentle. But as 

 soon as he has taken hardly more than ninety grammes of alcohol (96 

 proof) he becomes a wild anarchist, with fierce impulses and hallucina- 

 tions, of which he has no recollection two hours afterward, or even 

 charges them to his comrades. In this case a double personality is 

 revealed, the demonstration of which is completed by alterations of 

 the visual field and of the touch. 



We have, then, in Luccheni a degenerate and probably epileptic 

 person descended from an alcoholic father. Although he affirms that 

 he is not insane or a criminal born, he is a little of both, for he is 

 epileptic and hysterical, so that his denial is already a beginning of 

 a proof of disease. Luccheni also confirms what I have tried to 

 demonstrate in my Delitto politico that the most frequent organic 

 cause of similar morbid impulses of a political character is hystero- 

 epilepsy; for not only do the declarations of some of his country- 

 men point to epilepsy, and the characteristics of degeneration in the 

 skull confirm it, but his inheritance from an alcoholic father and 

 that impulsiveness and that double personality, which make him pass 

 from the gentlest of men to the cruelest, and which is reflected in 

 the macrography alternating with the micrography of the intervals 

 between the spasms, are accumulative evidence of it. 



I have demonstrated the hysterical and epileptic basis in the anar- 

 chists and regicides Felicot, Monges, and Caserio, and particularly 

 in a vagabond anarchist, full of cranial anomalies, who told me, when 

 I questioned him concerning political reforms, " Do not speak to me 

 of them, for as soon as I begin to think about them I am taken with 

 a vertigo and fall down " ; so that it seems to me possible to estab- 

 lish a psycho-epileptic equivalent in extreme political innovators, an 

 equivalent which is further manifest in their vanity, rising sometimes 



