Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 44.djvu/230

220 perfected in gentleness, grace, and pleasing manners, and withdrew from those qualities that required strength and cruelty. Other influences, not least among which is the longer duration of maternity, cause civilized women to become more compassionate; but in every woman there is an undercurrent of cruelty, which appears either when her nature is wicked or when her strongest feelings, such as those of mother or wife, are attacked. Hence Lombroso adduces that woman's attitude with regard to cruelty and pity is a contradictory one, which will by evolution give way in favor of gentleness and mercy. In the second part of his work Lombroso compares the crimes of female animals with the crimes of primitive and savage women; and in the third chapter he gives a brief history of prostitution, which he considers as one of the great factors in the promotion of crime. Under the heading, "Crimes of Primitive Women," the writer discusses adultery, abortion, infanticide, witchcraft, and poisoning, and concludes thus: "In general, women savages, like other women, commit fewer crimes than men, although their nature is rather worse than better; and the crimes for which they are punished are in great part conventional, such as those contained in tabu and witchcraft. What corresponds to crime among men is for savage women prostitution."

In the Pathological and Anthropometrical Anatomy of Female Criminals and Prostitutes, which forms the third part of the book, all the measurements which serve to establish those irregularities from which the criminal school draws its conclusions have been taken with the greatest care. According to Lombroso, they are for women the following: Height, the length of the arms when opened, and the length of the limbs are inferior in criminals weight being, in relation to their stature, greater in prostitutes and assassins than in ordinary women. The hands are longer and more developed in prostitutes, the foot shorter, the fingers less developed than the rest of the hand. The size and circumference of the skull in female thieves, and even more so in prostitutes, are small; vice versa, the facial diameter and especially the jaw are more developed than in normal specimens. The hair and iris are apt to be darker in criminals, and up to a certain point in prostitutes, in whom, however, fair and red hair are often lighter or darker than the normal color. White hair, which is rare in ordinary women, is twice as frequent in criminals; vice versa, with them baldness is rarer during youth and middle age than among ordinary women, while wrinkles are more frequent only when they are middle-aged. It has been difficult to gather these facts with certainty about prostitutes, who are nearly all painted and made up even when quite young; but from the data Lombroso had to go upon, precocious white hair and baldness