HERITABLE BASIS OF CRIME AND DELINQUENCY 81 
Whatever the final verdict of criminal anthropology may be 
concerning the physical peculiarities of the instinctive criminal, 
the evidence that a large proportion of crime is the outcome of 
innate mental defects and vicious propensities is abundant and 
convincing. Nearly all who have personally investigated the 
subject have found a high degree of criminality, alcoholism, and 
mental defect in the parents of criminals. Dr. Virgilio finds 
crime in 26.8 per cent of the parents of criminals, associated 
frequently with alcoholism. In the parentage of 447 criminals 
Penta found criminality in 88 cases, hysteria in 55, epilepsy in 33, 
alcoholism in 135 and insanity in 85. In the parents of 104 
criminals whose heredity was examined by Lombroso there were 
31 alcoholics, 10 criminals, ro insane, while criminality and 
prostitution were prominent in the brothers and sisters. Accord- 
ing to Ellis, ‘‘of the inmates of the Elmira Reformatory, 499, or 
13.7 per cent have been of insane or epileptic heredity. Of 233 
prisoners at Auburn, New York, 23.03 per cent were clearly of 
neurotic (insane, epileptic, etc.) origin, in reality many more.” 
Sichard, in 4,000 German criminals, found a neuropathic inheri- 
tance in 36. 8 per cent. And Pauline Tarnowsky in studying 160 
women homicides found alcoholism in 71.24 per cent of the par- 
ents, mental disease in 10 per cent, and syphilis in 32.5 per cent. 
Among thieves the percentages of these traits were 49, 6, and 
21 respectively, and among prostitutes 82.66, 9, and 48. Among 
the parents of 50 educated law-abiding women the percentage of 
alcoholism, mental disease and syphilis was 6, 2, and 10 respec- 
tively. 
The presence of criminality in successive generations of certain 
notorious families is doubtless to be attributed only in part to 
their unfortunate heredity, since environmental factors doubt- 
less contribute largely to the result. One of the first of such 
families to be studied in detail was the celebrated Jukes family 
which enlisted the interest of Mr. Dugdale, an able student of 
social problems and an active worker in prison reform. During 
his investigations of penal institutions in New York, Dugdale was 
struck with the recurrence of the same family name among the 
