CHAPTER IV 
THE HERITABLE BASIS OF CRIME AND 
DELINQUENCY 
“Si la pauvreté est la mére des crimes, le défaut d’esprit en est le 
pére.”—La Bruyére, De l’Homme. 
STRICTLY speaking it is of course absurd to speak of the inheri- 
tance of criminality. Crime is an offense against law. What is 
crime in one age and country may not be crime in another. No 
one is a criminal until he commits a crime, and whether or not a 
person so acts as to bring himself into conflict with the law of 
the land is obviously dependent upon many circumstances. 
Under just the proper combination of conditions, doubtless most 
of us might have become criminals, for a time at least. 
While crime is in a very large degree a product of bad training 
and evil surroundings, some individuals may have, in a much 
greater degree than others, certain traits which dispose them to 
commit criminal actions. What a man does is the result of both 
hereditary and environmental factors. The recognition of the 
fact that the criminal is not merely a sinner to be punished, but a 
product to be scientifically studied and understood, is gradually 
leading to a new attitude toward the phenomena of crime. As 
judged by many modern students of the subject, crime belongs 
largely in the field of pathology. Where it is not to be attributed 
to bad education or environment it is charged to abnormal 
heredity. 
Since the publication of Morel’s treatise on degeneration, there 
has been an increasing amount of attention paid to the various 
physical characteristics which are supposed to stigmatize the 
natural-born criminal. Among the foremost of the students of 
criminal anthropology is Lombroso whose anthropometric studies 
of numerous criminals in Italian prisons convinced him of the 
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