HERITABLE BASIS OF CRIME AND DELINQUENCY 75 



to explain that by type he does not mean a pattern to which all 

 born criminals conform. The type, as in comparative anatomy, 

 is an ideal construction from which the actual embodiments 

 depart to a greater or less degree. Some of the stigmata that 

 characterize the born criminal may fail in one offender and others 

 may be lacking in others. '' In normal individuals," says Madame 

 Ferrero, the daughter and approved interpreter of Lombroso, 

 "we never find that accumulation of physical, psychical, func- 

 tional and skeletal anomalies in one and the same person that we 

 do in the case of criminals, among whom also entire freedom from 

 abnormal characteristics is more rare than among ordinary 

 individuals." 



"Just as a musical theme is the result of a sum of notes and not 

 of any single note, the criminal type results from the aggregate 

 of these anomalies which render him strange and terrible, not 

 only to the scientific observer, but to ordinary persons who are 

 capable of impartial judgment." 



The instinctive suspicion that we entertain of certain bad 

 characters is held to be an indication of the existence of physical 

 signs of criminality. Popular sayings offer evidence of this as is 

 indicated by the following: "There is nothing worse under 

 Heaven than a scanty beard and a colorless face." "The squint 

 eyed are on all sides accursed." "A turned up nose is worse than 

 hail." "Beware of him who looks away when he speaks to you." 



Among the marks said to be characteristic of criminals are 

 anomalies in the size and shape of the skull, large face with 

 prominent cheek bones and jaws, asymmetry of the face, ears, 

 and eyes, drooping or oblique eyelids, and eyes with a hard ex- 

 pression and shifty glance, large misshapen ears frequently with 

 Darwin's tubercles, twisted nose, aquiline in murderers, but 

 flattened and upturned in thieves, palatal ridges, anomalous 

 teeth, scanty beard, and relatively long arms. In the brain 

 anomalies are frequent, such as hypertrophied vermis, doubling 

 of the fissure of Rolando, and peculiarities of the cells, especially 

 in the frontal lobes. Certain kinds of criminals, such as mur- 

 derers, are supposed to difi'er in their stigmata from others, such 



