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Page 49
[35] A masterly article on the "Localisation of Brain Functions"
will be found in Wundt's _Philosophische Studien Sechster Band_,
1. _Heft Zur Frage der Localisation der Grosshirnfunctionen_,
Von W. Wundt. Compare also _The Croonian Lectures on Cerebral
Localisation_, by David Ferrier. London: 1890.
An examination of the criminal face has so far led to no definite and
assured results. In the imagination of artists the criminal is almost
always credited with the possession of a retreating forehead. As a
matter of fact, Dr. Marro, one of the most eminent representatives of
the anthropological school, assures us that this is not the case.
After comparing the foreheads of 539 delinquents with the foreheads of
100 ordinary men, he found that criminals had a smaller percentage of
retreating foreheads than the average man.[36] He also found that
projecting eyebrows, another trait which is supposed to be a criminal
peculiarity, were almost as common among ordinary people as among
offenders against the law. Projecting ears is another peculiarity
which is often associated with the idea of a criminal. But Dr. Lannois
states that after a careful examination of the ears of 43 young
offenders, he found them as free from anomalies as the ears of other
people.[37]
[36] Marro, _I Caratteri dei Delinquenti_, p. 157.
[37] _Archives d'anthropologie criminelle Livraison_, 10.
As it is the Italians who have studied these matters most exhaustively,
it is mainly to them we must go for information. In a little book on
the skeleton and the form of the nose, Dr. Salvator Ottolenghi comes to
the somewhat curious result that the bones of the criminal nose offer
many anomalies of a pre-human or bestial character; but the nose itself
is straight and long, or, in other words, just as highly developed as
the noses of ordinary men. Careful inquiries have been undertaken by
criminal anthropologists into the colour of the hair, the length of the
arms, the colour of the skin, tattooing, sensitiveness to pain among
the criminal population, but these laborious investigations have so
far led to few solid conclusions. According to Lombroso, insensibility
to pain is a marked characteristic of the typical criminal.[38]
"Individuals," he says, "who possess this quality consider themselves
as privileged, and they despise delicate and sensitive persons. It is a
pleasure to such hardened men to torment others whom they look upon as
inferior beings." On this point M. Joly is at variance with Lombroso.
"I asked," he says, "at the central hospital, the Sant�, where all
persons who become seriously ill in the prisons of the Seine are looked
after, if this disvulnerability had ever been noticed. I was told that
far from that, prisoners were always found very sensitive to pain ...
Honest people, industrious workmen, the fathers of families treated at
the Charit� or the H�tel-Dieu (Paris hospitals), undergo operations
with much more fortitude than the sick prisoners of the Sant�."[39] On
this point, therefore, as on so many others, we are still without a
sufficient body of evidence, and must, meanwhile, suspend our judgment.
[38] _L'Homme Criminel_, 324.
[39] _Le Crime_, 193.
Let us now consider the criminal's physiognomy. In this connection it
must be borne in mind that a prolonged period of imprisonment will
change the face of any man, whether he is a criminal or not. Political
offenders who have undergone a sentence of penal servitude, and who may
be men of the highest character, acquire the prison look and never
altogether get rid of it. If a man spends a certain number of years
sharing the life, the food, the occupations of five or six hundred
other men, if he mixes with them and with no one else, he will
inevitably come to resemble them in face and feature. A remarkable
illustration of this fact has recently been brought to light by the
Photographic Society of Geneva. "From photographs of seventy-eight old
couples, and of as many adult brothers and sisters, it was found that
twenty-four of the former resembled each other much more strongly than
as many of the latter who were thought most like one another."[40] It
would, therefore, seem that the action of unconscious imitation,
arising from constant contact, is capable of producing a remarkable
change in the features, the acquired expression frequently tending to
obliterate inherited family resemblances. According to Piderit,
physiognomy is to be considered as a mimetic expression which has
become habitual. The criminal type of face, so conspicuous in old
offenders, is in many cases merely a prison type; it is not congenital;
men who do not originally have it almost always acquire it after a
prolonged period of penal servitude.
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