Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/766

744 It is instructive to turn from him, and the class of melodramatic ruffians of whom he is but an example, to the criminals dispassionately laid bare in mental, moral, and physical dissection by Lombroso and his fellow-workers. Certainly no such type as Bill Sykes, a projected image of the novelist's brains, coinciding with a highly strung nervous system, is to be found in the gallery of habitual malefactors presented to us in the Uomo Delinquente and other books. Habitual malefactors, according to Italian students, are a class apart from other men, a distinct species of "genus Homo sapiens," must be judged by special standards, and must by no means be informed with the feelings of normal men. Herein consists the fundamental basis of the new science of criminal anthropology—a science which bids fair, in spite of conservative and clerical opposition and even of ignorant ridicule, to modify profoundly our present manner of considering and treating these enemies and pests of society.

"Criminal anthropology," says Signor Sergi, one of the ablest exponents of the new system, "studies the delinquent in his natural place—that is to say, in the field of biology and pathology. But it does not for that reason put him outside the society in which his criminal manifestations occur, for it considers human society as a natural biological fact, outside of which man does not and can not live. As normal anthropology, like other biological sciences, studies and observes the individual in his natural milieu, and finds that this milieu is double, physical and organic, and under this double aspect sees him develop and act, so criminal anthropology does the same with the very limited and specialized aim of discovering the nature and origin of the phenomenon of crime. Every phenomenon, however, remains inexplicable if it be examined alone; the explanation is easier if it be studied in the complex of phenomena developed in the double physical and social milieu of which we have spoken."

Words such as these, where we find embryology, physiology, anatomy, chemistry, and statistics, invoked as aids to the origin of crime, place us at the antipodes of ancient philosophies; yet Lombroso and his school are in reality acting on the old-world notion embodied by Horace in his "mens sana in corpore sano." The delinquent, they argue, acts abnormally. Acts being the visible results of functions performed by the brain and reflective nervous system, it follows that these functions are abnormal. The functions being abnormal, the organs which perform them must be either abnormal or troubled in their action by the habitual or accidental interference of disturbing causes, for no normal organ acting under normal conditions can perform abnormal functions. The founders of this new school, therefore, dedicate themselves first of all to the study of the skull, brain, and nervous system of the criminals; then