Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 55.djvu/215

Rh provoked by their disease. In one, as I have shown in L'Uomo Delinquente, they write signatures that cover a whole page in their larger diameter, while the signature in the normal state is often smaller than the average (see Fig. 3).

The same double personality that is apparent in the writing is attested in the psychology. We have seen that Luccheni was kind to children, that he was a good servant, characteristics quite opposed to the anarchistic nature, and a genial companion; a man who in Africa was enthusiastically fond of military life; who, a little while before, when he was in the service of the captain, had expressed extreme monarchical sentiments; and finally, when he had become an anarchist, again asked his master to be restored to his service. This double personality is another of the essential characteristics of hysteria and epilepsy.

I have recently studied an epileptoid degenerate who has a sound mind, and, at least in his normal state, is quiet and gentle. But as soon as he has taken hardly more than ninety grammes of alcohol (96° proof) he becomes a wild anarchist, with fierce impulses and hallucinations, of which he has no recollection two hours afterward, or even charges them to his comrades. In this case a double personality is revealed, the demonstration of which is completed by alterations of the visual field and of the touch.

We have, then, in Luccheni a degenerate and probably epileptic person descended from an alcoholic father. Although he affirms that he is not insane or a criminal born, he is a little of both, for he is epileptic and hysterical, so that his denial is already a beginning of a proof of disease. Luccheni also confirms what I have tried to demonstrate in my Delitto politico—that the most frequent organic cause of similar morbid impulses of a political character is hystero-epilepsy; for not only do the declarations of some of his countrymen point to epilepsy, and the characteristics of degeneration in the skull confirm it, but his inheritance from an alcoholic father and that impulsiveness and that double personality, which make him pass from the gentlest of men to the crudest, and which is reflected in the macrography alternating with the micrography of the intervals between the spasms, are accumulative evidence of it.

I have demonstrated the hysterical and epileptic basis in the anarchists and regicides Felicot, Monges, and Caserio, and particularly in a vagabond anarchist, full of cranial anomalies, who told me, when I questioned him concerning political reforms, "Do not speak to me of them, for as soon as I begin to think about them I am taken with a vertigo and fall down"; so that it seems to me possible to establish a psycho-epileptic equivalent in extreme political innovators, an equivalent which is further manifest in their vanity, rising sometimes