For instance, just as some special excellence of some special organ may be handed down, so may some special defect A child may inherit the defect, or the excellence. Or he may inherit a talent from both parents, and so may excel them both.
A man may inherit his genius piecemeal from a hundred ancestors, some of them dead for centuries, or he may owe his special brilliance to some excitement, or even to some derangement of the nervous system. In fact, to what Lombroso calls "degeneracy." He may be like a river, fed by several ancestral streams. He may be the descendant of some "mute inglorious Milton." But one thing he is not—he is not a "mystery." There is nothing in his greatness more mysterious than the accumulation of money in a bank, or the agrandisement of a river by its tributary streams, or the sudden appearance of a pattern of unusual beauty in a kaleidoscope.
There is nothing in genius to belie heredity. There is nothing in genius that cannot be accounted for by heredity—if we remember the laws of variation, and of atavism, or breeding back.
"THE BORN CRIMINAL"
Speaking strictly, there are no "born criminals"; but there are some unfortunate creatures born with a nature prone to crime, just as there are others born with a nature prone to disease.
These "born criminals," regarded by their better-endowed or luckier brothers and sisters as "wicked," are the victims of "atavism" or of "degeneracy."
They are as much to be pitied, and as little to be blamed, as those born with a liability to insanity or consumption.
Atavism, as we have seen, is a reversion to an older and a lower type, a "breeding back," in some points, to the savage or the brute.
"Degeneracy" is the inherited result of vice, insanity, or disease in the parent Lombroso describes degeneracy as "the action of heredity in the children of the inebriate, the syphilitic, the insane, the consumptive, etc.; or of accidental causes, such as lesions of the head, or the action of mercury, which profoundly change the tissues, perpetuates neuroses or other diseases in the patient, and, which is worse, aggravates them in his descendants."
The atavist is a man born with the nature, or some of the traits of bestial or savage ancestors. He is bred back to the type that was before morals. He is born with strong animal traits, with few social qualities; with little or no moral brain. He is a modern child, born with the passions, or the appetites, or the intelligence, of an ape, or a cave-man. To expect him to rise to the moral standard of to-day, and to blame him if he fail, is as unreasonable as it would be to expect the same conduct from a gorilla, or a panther.