26 HEREDITY AND SOCIETY 



denote a close relationship between certain types of 

 habitual criminals and the savage, and lead to the 

 conclusion that criminal tendencies are often due to 

 a reversion towards a primitive and lower type of 

 humanity. Occasionally they exhibit structural abnor- 

 malities, especially in the brain, characteristic, not only 

 of primitive savages, but of still lower types, as far 

 back as the carnivora. 



These born criminals, known to come, wherever their 

 ancestry can be traced, out of families already over- 

 burdened with a history of crime, are believed to 

 constitute about one-third of the mass of offenders 

 as far as Italian statistics are concerned. They form 

 the most important part of the offenders, for their 

 crimes are usually of a peculiarly monstrous character, 

 and they reappear before the public notice almost as 

 soon as they are set at liberty. Heredity, according 

 to Lombroso, is the principal organic cause of criminal 

 tendencies : direct heredity from criminal parentage ; 

 indirect heredity from a generically degenerate family, 

 showing also frequent cases of insanity, deafness, 

 syphilis, epilepsy and alcoholism among its members. 

 Almost all forms of chronic constitutional disease, 

 especially those of a nervous character, may give rise 

 to criminality in the descendants. 



Lombroso considers that certain villages in Italy 

 which are hotbeds of crime probably owe their pre- 

 eminence to ethnical causes. The frequency of homi- 

 cide in Calabria, Sicily and Sardinia he attributes to a 

 large admixture of African and Oriental elements in 

 the population. 



Of the second class of criminals, those drawn from 



