A Study of Cerebral Anthropology 47 



(6) a long outer parieto-occipital fissure (Affenspalte) ; (7) the 

 uncovered cerebellum. It does not seem to me that the literature 

 warrants these conclusions, especially in regard to the sulcus cen- 

 tralis. Sernofif (1896) studied the first six characters and found 

 that they occurred in the brains of non-criminals as frequently as 

 they did in the brains of criminals. He believed that the mor- 

 phology of the brain, as described in the text books, was entirely 

 too diagrammatic to be relied on for accurate comparisons in an 

 attempt to establish an abnormal condition. He made a com- 

 parative study of the brains of forty-two criminals and fifty 

 normal brains. His conclusions were that Lombroso's mistake 

 was that he extended the idea of degeneration too far, and made 

 variations which have always been recognized as anomalies in true 

 morphology, or as one may say, individual variations, appear to 

 have a suggested influence on the function, when it is definitely 

 known that they have no influence worthy of note on the function 

 of the organ. Again he made a second error when he considered 

 the appearance of the so-called atavism as a positive indication of 

 lower organization. " Der Atavismus bezw., die atavistischen 

 Anomalien der modernen Wissenschaft ist aber ein rein atom- 

 ischer Begriff, die functionische Seite der Frage, die Frage noch 

 dem etwaigen Einflusse atavistischer Erscheinung auf die Organ- 

 verreichungen ist bis anhin nicht einmal beriihrt worden." 



Mondio (1895) concludes that almost all cases show in the 

 brain an arrest of development and agrees with the hypothesis of 

 Debierre, " I criminali, avere cioe, meno cervello dei non crimi- 

 nali," i. e., criminals have less brain capacity than noncriminals. 

 The inability of our knowledge to show, in the significant mor- 

 phological characters of animals near to man, a clear agreement 

 between the anatomical facts and the special characters of mind 

 (animo), between the modifications of the cerebral surface and the 

 development of the intellectual faculties, prevents us from estab- 

 lishing a criminal type, which we might be tempted to do from 

 the variations which we see of kind and degree between criminal 

 and noncriminal brains. But since from the very multiplicity of 

 variations we may not establish the individuality which distin- 

 guishes them but only the differences, we can say with Tenchini 



391 



