TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION H. 905 



or psycliological dnta for establishing a criminal type was pointed out. But the 

 author said that one conclusion was forced upon him. If there was not an 

 absolutely marked criminal type all would agree that criminals fell far below a 

 high anatomical and physiological standard of brain, body, and mind. The weak 

 point in criminal anthropology was that while criminals had been weighed, 

 measured, observed, and described, tlie classes of society from which most of them 

 came, but who had not been convicted of breaking the law, had not been ob- 

 served in the same way, and had not had the same scientific tests applied to them. 

 There was little use in gauging the criminal by the standard of the well-fed, the 

 respectable, and the comfortable classes of .society. The scientific method would 

 be to apply the test to whole sections of the lower labouring classes of society, 

 including the criminals. There was a large class of human beings whose brains 

 suffered manifestly from arrested development of normal function. This existed in 

 any and every degree, and might extend to any and every mental and moral faculty. 

 A human being only slightly imbecile in mind had many anatomical and psychological 

 resemblances to the criminal. Scientific anthropology that covered the whole' 

 ground must deal with the idle, the vagrant, the pauper, the prostitute, the 

 drunkard, the imbecile, the epileptic, and the insane, as well as the criminal and 

 the class to which he usually belonged. If inquiry established physical, hereditary, 

 and psychological bases of criminality, the State would have to treat the criminal 

 from a point of view entirely different from the punitive method. Such was the 

 contention of the modi-rn school of that department of study. One physiological 

 aspect of the question had not obtained the observation it was worthy of, and that 

 was the developmental aspect, nor had the evolutional aspect had sufEcient atten- 

 tion paid to it. Many were criminals because their brains were the same as those 

 of their ancestors, aiid their environment had changed only in the present genera- 

 tion. In some districts of the country there were actually no criminals, yet when 

 some of the people of those districts went to live in great cities they became 

 habitual criminals. The too sudden exposure to new environments and conditions, 

 with the necessary attempts at adaptation to those environments, was one of the 

 great factors of criminality and of certain forms of insanity. The later years of 

 adolescence were those in which the great inhibitory moral and social faculties 

 that fit men to live in a well-ordered civil modern society attain such perfection as 

 they are capable of, and it is during this period that most of our criminals become 

 such. It is in the early years of adolescence that epilepsy arises in the greatest 

 degree, and in the later years that 'adolescent insanity,' hysteria, dipsomania, 

 asthma, phthisis, and other developmental diseases of the mental, motor, or nutri- 

 tive functions arise. Criminality in certain cases seems to class itself among such 

 developmental defects. The essential likeness of the epileptic and the criminal 

 hrain is one of the most striking of Dr. Benedikt's observations. What are to 

 the doctor symptoms of diseases are to the policeman and the magistrate proofs 

 of criminality. In the rich family the doctor looked after the case ; in the poor 

 family the policeman and the gaoler. Yet both cases were equally phases of brain 

 development due to hereditary weakness. A deformity in the hard palate which 

 became high in the centre and V-shaped he found to exist in 35 per cent, of criminals, 

 37 per cent, of epileptics, 55 per cent, of the adolescent insane, and Gl per cent, 

 of idiots and imbeciles, as compared with 19 per cent, of the general population, 

 and the hard palate has a close relationship to the base of the anterior lobes 

 of the brain in man, those lobes being closely related to the mental functions. He 

 had seen and studied many cases of crime or vice in which moral responsibility 

 did not exist. All considerations pointed to two great sources of criminality. The 

 first was the not fully evolved man who was fitted to do his work in a primitive 

 society, but who could not accommodate himself to the conditions of a life of a 

 highly organised and extremely artificial modern society, and who fell into crimi- 

 nality and swelled the list through his environment. The second was the patho- 

 logically non-developed man, whose development had been arrested towards the end 

 of the period of adolescence before his inhibitory and moral qualities had attained 

 their full strength. 



