Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 44.djvu/231

Rh would be a common defect, as it is in those who are born delinquents. Irregularities of countenance are to be met with in a greater degree in female assassins and poisoners than in infanticides. The real criminal type is rarer among female than male delinquents; it is found more frequently among prostitutes, and according to a still more precise study made by Tarnowsky, there are more female murderers than thieves, while prostitutes are the most numerous of all.

"In short," as our author writes, "female criminals have less typical faces, because they are less criminal than men, and women in every degeneration present fewer digressions than men, because women being organically conservative preserve the average type even in their moral aberrations; besides which, beauty being a supreme necessity for them, this overcomes all the attacks made by moral degeneracy. Still, it can not be denied that when wickedness is deep-rooted, then the general rule which stamps crime with a type, conquers every obstacle, at least in civilized races, and this is particularly the case with prostitutes, because the latter recall the type of primitive woman much more than female criminals."

The third part closes with a fine chapter on tattooing in women, the tendency to tattoo being, according to Lombroso, an infallible indication of criminal tendencies.

The fourth and last part of the work is entitled The Biology and Psychology of Female Criminals and Prostitutes. It is divided into twelve chapters that are crowded with the most minute and subtle researches. The first three treat of female criminals and prostitutes in general; the others make a separate study of women born with criminal tendencies and those who have become criminals through incidental causes, such as love; suicides; women born with a natural inclination to prostitution; women who have become prostitutes through circumstances; insane criminals; epileptic and hysterical delinquents. It is this portion of the work that has required the greatest circumspection. It is so easy here to fall into errors in drawing conclusions from such complicated and various data as presented themselves, and the more, because the variety of subjects examined is very large. Lombroso, in making a résumê of the second chapter, observes that fatness of the palm of the hand and irregularities in the pupil of the eye are greater in prostitutes than in female criminals, but are never so marked as in male criminals. The reflections in the pupil of the eye in prostitutes are, however, duller than in male criminals, this being accounted for by the direct action of syphilis on the nervous centers.

Few women are born with criminal tendencies, according to Lombroso; but when this is the case, criminality is more intense