Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 49.djvu/703

Rh proportionate motives is nothing else but the result of abnormal or diseased organisms. However, this factor of bloodthirstiness might better be classified by itself. Perhaps (among the animals who are criminals born), although it has a no less legitimate place among those crimes induced by antisocial instincts where Ferri has placed it, it has also no connection with madness. The classical divorce of crimes from insanity, rejected by positive science, finds also here in the study of innate or acquired bloodthirstiness a heavy defeat. Just as there are good and domesticable animals, so there are perverse ones even among the domesticated, absolutely comparable to the criminal born, as Lombroso and others have contended.

This group of facts brings still more into relief the fundamental analogy between the criminal activity of animals and of men. A yet, more eloquent proof is found, by studying the group of murders induced by mental alienation and by cannibalism. From l'homme machine of Descartes we have come to insanity among animals, concerning which there is no manner of doubt, seeing the result of recent studies, and this means that brutes have in common with man various mental maladies, differing only in degree.

Ferri divides into five categories the cases of murder among animals determined by madness, no matter whether transitory or permanent, innate or acquired: murder by hereditary tendencies, by mania, by impulse of fear, by senility, by alcoholism (for the effects of alcohol in all its divers forms on animals are well known), and subjects them to a brief but deeply interesting examination. All the murders enumerated have their scope and limit in the murder of their fellows. In animals, as we also see among savages and even among civilized peoples, crime is continued with outrages on the corpse and with cannibalism. The origin of this unnatural mode of alimentation must certainly be sought in the need induced by hunger. It is only after that that cannibalism becomes an organic tendency in animals and man. However, man has motives for anthropophagy different from those of animals. Ferri classifies cannibalism among animals in two categories, simple cannibalism (wolves, rats, etc.; Lombroso also cites the case of a dog), and cannibalism among relations—that is to say, infanticide and parricide (crocodile, fox, etc.). To render this exposition of crime in animals yet more complete, the author hints at another possible class, suicide, which is certainly not unknown among animals.

Having thus passed in review all the categories of crime in animals, Ferri devotes a chapter to drawing from the facts he has accumulated their obvious and special conclusions, pointing out the striking psychic analogy of motive and of execution existing