Cesare Lombroso, a modern man of science

by Hans Kurella

3. Is it found in the higher apes, and, if so, is it an occasional or a constant feature?

4. Is it found in other species of the group of primates?

5. Is it found in animals lower than these in the scale of classification?

6. Is it found in human beings presenting congenital morbid anomalies; more especially is it found in epileptics and in idiots?

It is easy to understand that such investigations are very laborious. In order to throw light on the meaning of comparatively insignificant data, it may be necessary to organize most comprehensive researches. Unceasing care and indefatigability in such isolated observations, and in the interpretation of their meaning, is one of Lombroso’s highest claims to honour. For this reason, his books and the thirty volumes of his archives will remain for many decades to come a rich mine of discovery for anthropology, as soon as this science returns from the study of Mongols and Australians to the examination of contemporary Europeans. As a result of these investigations, the fact has been established that, above all in the skulls and the brains of criminals, but also in other parts of the skeleton, in the muscles, and in the viscera, we find anatomical peculiarities, which in some cases resemble the characters of the few authentic remnants of the earliest prehistoric human beings, in other cases correspond to the characters of still extant lower races of mankind, and in yet others, correspond to the characters of some or all of the varieties of monkey.

From these facts Lombroso draws a somewhat rash conclusion—namely, that there are born criminals, representing the type of mankind which existed before the origin of law, the family, and property, and that the representatives of long past conditions thus thrust upon our own time are incapable of respecting the security of life and property and other legal rights; but, bold as this conclusion seems, it has, none the less, all the qualities of a scientific conjecture, inasmuch as it harmonizes with all the known facts, and enables us to deal in an orderly and critical manner with the material upon which it bears.

I leave the question open whether we are to regard this idea as a theory or merely as a hypothesis; but it is necessary to point out, in opposition to the obstinate assertions of Lombroso’s opponents, that the Italian school of anthropology has never maintained the proposition that all persons who come before European courts of justice upon criminal charges, or all who are confined in the criminal prisons of Europe, are the unchanged descendants of the Neanderthal men, who hunted the cave-bear with stone arrows. Put as concisely as possible, the doctrine of the Italian school runs as follows: Born criminals exist, presenting typical characters, both bodily and mental, and they owe their peculiar organization to the fact that their development has been affected by an atavistic reversion. It is impossible here to give particulars showing the manner in which, in the five successive editions of “L’ uomo delinquente,” this conception becomes gradually more clearly defined.

I may be permitted to make some further observations regarding the nature of this atavistic reversion. There is not one single characteristic of the human anatomy which is not the product of inheritance. The existing type of the European mixed race appears to be a permanent type; or rather, owing to the fact that the struggle for existence of our time takes an almost exclusively economic form, and that in consequence of this the brain has received a preponderant importance, the present phase of human evolution affects the brain only (in women, unfortunately, as well as in men); if any other organ than the brain is influenced by selection in modern man, it is affected solely or mainly on account of its correlation with brain development.

Naturally, future extensive changes in the size and shape of the brain will ultimately give rise to changes more or less extensive in neighbouring organs also, such as the bones of the skull, the teeth, the jaws, the external ear, and the upper cervical vertebræ. But for the brief period which the individual investigator has under his observation in the course of his life, the human species may approximately be regarded as a permanent type. Now our most enduring possessions in the way of bodily characteristics are inherited from very remote ancestors—they are atavisms. The great weight of the brain, the upright forehead, the large facial angle, peculiar to the European, have been inherited by him from his ancestors of the historic epoch; on the other hand, the number and shape of his teeth, the structure of his sense-organs, the arrangement of the fissures and convolutions of his cerebral cortex, the number and form of the mammary glands, the configuration of the upper limbs—these the European shares with the so-called anthropoid apes, with whom in other respects also he possesses a very close blood-relationship. Finally, the number of our fingers and toes, and the structure of the various tissues, as demonstrated by the microscope, are common to us and to the great majority of mammals; whilst innumerable other physical characteristics are shared by us with the lower vertebrata. Thus most of our bodily peculiarities are derived from our prehuman ancestors; they are atavisms, interesting antiquities. But if this be so, then the occasional appearance of one or two additional atavistic characters, whether these be derived from the men of the ice-age or from those of the tertiary period, or date back to the still undiscovered ape-men of a yet earlier day, or to the half-apes, or even to our remote fish-like progenitors, is hardly so incredible an occurrence as to demand that the thunderbolts of sterile anthropometry, so long carefully cherished by Virchow, should be launched against the heretic Lombroso.[^[10]]

Modern man has freed himself from much that was rooted in the blood and bone of his forefathers. But unquestionably he has not freed himself from all that was so rooted, and therefore it need not surprise us to encounter individuals who exhibit, firmly fixed either in their bodily or in their mental organization, characteristics which in the majority have been weakened or have disappeared.