2 C. W. M. Poynter 



It has seemed to me that a tabulation of the results of the vast 

 amount of investigation carried on in the last forty or fifty years 

 would perhaps yield some definite facts, or at least furnish a very 

 much more valuable group of data for comparison with my two 

 criminal brains than I could obtain by the study of even a consid- 

 erable number of brains of the type available from my dissecting 

 rooms. 



It has seemed to me that if criminal characters in morpholog- 

 ical form exist, they are not the result of the simple act which 

 makes the individual a law-breaker, hence a criminal, but are 

 rather the result of perverted development, heredity, or other 

 factors which may have been operative to perhaps the same 

 degree in the " paupers " who supply the material for our labora- 

 tories, and that consequently nothing would be learned from such 

 a comparison of criminals and non-criminals. 



I have not brought into this study any of the more recent devel- 

 opments from microscopical investigations, but only work having 

 a bearing on the theory of the existence of a criminal type and the 

 more recent theory that the criminal brain is of an inferior order. 

 I have attempted to bring together the more important researches 

 on the various orders of apes, on the studies of the races both 

 primitive and highly civilized, on the development of the sulci and 

 gyri in the human embryo, on that condition of defective mind 

 known as microcephaly, and on the brains of eminent scholars. I 

 have selected from these studies those characters which seemed 

 most nearly to represent the normal brain, and have attempted to 

 discover what variations in form or convolution have a functional 

 significance, — that is, for example, a pattern of fissures, which 

 might be a common feature of a group of individuals belonging to 

 a race or class known to be of high or low mental ability. I have 

 collected the descriptions of all the criminal brains available to 

 compare them for common characteristics, to make comparison of 

 these results with the ' normal ' and also with my material. 



It is hardly necessary to say that the varied nomenclature en- 

 countered in such a study as this renders comparisons always diffi- 

 cult and sometimes impossible. The great dissimilarity of method 

 used in investigation frequently renders the available data entirely 



346 



