Page:Symonds - A Problem in Modern Ethics.djvu/74

62 abnormal appetites as signs of that morbid condition into which he eventually revolves the criminal impulse.

Wishing to base his doctrine on a sound foundation, Lombroso begins with what may be termed the embryology of crime. He finds unnatural vices frequent among horses, donkeys, cattle, insects, fowls, dogs, ants. The phenomenon, he says, is usually observable in cases where the male animal has been excluded from intercourse with females. Having established his general position that what we call crimes of violence, robbery, murder, cruelty, blood-thirst, cannibalism, unnatural lust, and so forth, exist among the brutes—in fact, that most of these crimes form the rule and not the exception in their lives—he passes on to the consideration of the savage man. In following his analysis, I shall confine myself to what he says about abnormal sexual passion.

He points out that in New Caledonia the male savages meet together at night in huts for the purpose of promiscuous intercourse (p. 42). The same occurs in Tahiti, where the practice is placed under the protection of a god. Next he alludes to the ancient Mexicans; and then proceeds to Hellas and Rome, where this phase of savage immorality survived and became a recognised factor in social life (p. 43). At Rome, he says, the Venus of the sodomites received the title of Castina (p. 38).

Lombroso's treatment of sexual inversion regarded as a survival from prehistoric times is by no means exhaustive. It might be supplemented and confirmed by what we know about the manners of the Kelts, as reported by Aristotle (Pol. ii. 6. 5.)—Tartars, Persians,