Such individuals, exhibiting characters no longer possessed by the European permanent type, but still common to the most primitive extant races of mankind, such as the Old Peruvians, the Papuans, and the Australian blacks, and common also to the other primates, are found among criminals, as Lombroso showed, with remarkable frequency—in fact, to the extent of more than 40 per cent.—and with especial frequency among those whose first crime is of a serious nature, and among those who have for many years been living for and by crime.
In addition, we meet with numerous characters, either not atavisms, or not yet regarded as atavisms, but which are or may be rather of a morbid nature. Thus, the skull or the brain of a criminal may exhibit, in addition to dubious atavistic characters, certain morbid features or signs of past disease. It is, indeed, by no means improbable that a congenital atavistic special predisposition may only become active to such an extent as to lead to a criminal act in consequence of some superadded disease; but in such a case it is idle to dispute whether we have to do with a congenital, an insane, or an alcoholic criminal.
If Lombroso’s teaching were based solely upon the examination of the skulls and brains of criminals to be found in European collections, its foundation would unquestionably be too narrow. But it is based, in addition, upon the anthropological examination of many thousands of living criminals—an examination quite as thorough as that carried out by an anthropologist in the case of a savage tribe which he has crossed the world to study.
The examination of living criminals cannot, of course, take into account the convolutions of the brain, or the fossæ, foramina, and processes on the inner surface of the skull. The first place must here be given to the external measurements of the head.
Now, as regards many of the problems of anthropology, it is left to the examiner to decide whether he will describe the facts he has to record by means of figures or ratios, or by means of a catchword descriptive of some visible peculiarity of shape or of some other objective fact.
Thus the presence of a thick bony prominence in the middle of the hard palate (torus palatinus) may, of course, be indicated by simply recording the numerical results of the measurements of the palate; but, on the other hand, we may prefer to state that one man has a slightly developed torus palatinus, another a large torus, a third none at all, and so on.
Another important character gives to the face, when seen from the front, an extremely typical shape. This is a great lateral extension of the malar bones, or, to speak more precisely, of the zygomatic arches. This condition may be denoted simply by the one word, eurygnathism, which describes it amply and aptly. On the other hand, instead of employing this term, we may, in the case of each person examined, record the exact width of the face between the malar eminences, and note also the relation of this measurement to the width of the forehead.
As regards characteristics of form, however, it is much more convenient, and at the same time conveys a much more vivid impression, to denote these merely quantitative variations, and also relations perceptible only through comparison, by means of a generally descriptive terminology, which must not, of course, be confused with the precise description of actual structures.
Employing this method, we have a lengthy register of crimino-anthropological characters, and in the following table I append a fragment of such a register: