Criminal Sociology | Page 7

reformation none the less survive, even for the
positive school, whenever it is possible, and for certain classes of
criminals; but, as a fundamental principle of a scientific theory, it has
passed away.
Hitherto, then, the classical school stands alone, with varying shades of
opinion, but one and distinct as a method, and as a body of principles
and consequences. And whilst it has achieved its aim in the most recent
penal codes, with a great, and too frequently an excessive diminution of
punishments, so in respect of theory, in Italy, Germany, and France it
has crowned its work with a series of masterpieces amongst which I
will only mention Carrara's ``Programme of Criminal Law.'' As the
author tells us in one of his later editions, from the a priori principle
that ``crime is a fact dependent upon law, an infraction rather than an
action,'' he deduced--and that by the sheer force of an admirable
logic--a complete symmetrical scheme of legal and abstract

consequences, wherein judges are compelled, whether they like it or
not, to determine the position of every criminal who comes before
them.
But now the classical school, which sprang from the marvellous little
work of Beccaria, has completed its historic cycle. It has yielded all it
could, and writers of the present day who still cling to it can only recast
the old material. The youngest of them, indeed, are condemned to a sort
of Byzantine discussion of scholastic formulas, and to a sterile process
of scientific rumination.
And meantime, outside our universities and academies, criminality
continues to grow, and the punishments hitherto inflicted, though they
can neither protect nor indemnify the honest, succeed in corrupting and
degrading evil-doers. And whilst our treatises and codes (which are too
often mere treatises cut up into segments) lose themselves in the fog of
their legal abstractions, we feel more strongly every day, in police
courts and at assizes, the necessity for those biological and sociological
studies of crime and criminals which, when logically directed, can
throw light as nothing else can upon the administration of the penal
law.


CHAPTER I.
THE DATA OF CRIMINAL ANTHROPOLOGY.
The experimental school of criminal sociology took its original title
from its studies of anthropology; it is still commonly regarded as little
more than a ``criminal anthropology school.'' And though this title no
longer corresponds with the development of the school, which also
takes into account and investigates the data of psychology, statistics,
and sociology, it is none the less true that the most characteristic
impetus of the new scientific movement was due to anthropological
studies. This was conspicuously the case when Lombroso, giving a

scientific form to sundry scattered and fragmentary observations upon
criminals, added fresh life to them by a collection of inquiries which
were not only original but also governed by a distinct idea, and
established the new science of criminal anthropology.
It is possible, of course, to discover a very early origin for criminal
anthropology, as for general anthropology; for, as Pascal said, man has
always been the most wonderful object of study to himself. For
observations on physiognomy in particular we may go as far backwards
as to Plato, and his comparisons of the human face and character with
those of the brutes, or even to Aristotle, who still earlier observed the
physical and psychological correspondence between the passions of
men and their facial expression. And after the mediaeval gropings in
chiromancy, metoscopy, podomancy and so forth, one comes to the
seventeenth century studies in physiognomy by the Jesuit Niquetius, by
Cortes, Cardanus, De la Chambre, Della Porta, &c., who were
precursors of Gall, Spurzheim, and Lavater on one side, and, on the
other, of the modern scientific study of the emotions, with their
expression in face and gesture, conducted by Camper, Bell, Engel,
Burgess, Duchenne, Gratiolet, Piderit, Mantegazza, Schaffhausen,
Schack, Heiment, and above all by Darwin.
With regard to the special observation of criminals, over and above the
limited statements of the old physiognomists and phrenologists,
Lauvergne (1841) in France and Attomyr (1842) in Germany had
accurately applied the theories of Gall to the examination of convicts;
and their works, in spite of certain exaggerations of phrenology, are
still a valuable treasury of observations in anthropology. In Italy, De
Rolandis (1835) had published his observations on a deceased criminal;
in America, Sampson (1846) had traced the connection between
criminality and cerebral organisation; in Germany, Camper (1854)
published a study on the physiognomy of murderers; and Ave
Lallemant (1858-62) produced a long work on criminals, from the
psychological point of view.
But the science of criminal anthropology, more strictly speaking, only
begins with the observations of English gaol surgeons and other learned

men, such as Forbes Winslow (1854), Mayhew (1860), Thomson
(1870), Wilson (1870), Nicolson (1872), Maudsley (1873), and with