A Plea for the Criminal / Being a reply to Dr. Chapple's work: 'The Fertility of the / Unfit', and an Attempt to explain the leading principles / of Criminological and Reformatory Science

Man has two natures, the animal and the spiritual.

we should study the criminal and ask ourselves "what is he?" and "of what forces is he the product?"

Habitual homicides have a glassy, cold, immobile, sometimes sanguinary and dejected look; often an aquiline nose, or, in other words, a hooked one like a bird of prey, always large; the jaws are large, ears long, hair woolly, abundant and rich (dark); beard rare, canine teeth, very large; the lips are thin.

Feeble cranial capacity; heavy and developed jaw; large orbital capacity; projecting superciliary ridges; abnormal and assymetrical cranium; the presence of a median occipital fossa.

The following typical peculiarities have been noticed by different criminologists:

there are many persons of distinctly criminal instincts who are kept in the paths of honesty merely by circumstances

the born criminal can be nothing more than an epileptic; criminality being a neurosis.

"The type of a species," adds Isidorus St. Helaire, "never appears before our eyes but is perceived only by the mind." "Human types," writes Broca, "have no real existence, they are only abstract conceptions, ideals, which come from the comparison of ethnic varieties, and are composed of an ENSEMBLE of characters common to a certain degree among themselves."

the one case we have to deal with the criminal CHARACTER and in the other with the criminal HABIT. The distinction is first seen in the different ages at which each commences his criminal career; nextly in the different impelling causes. Again, the emotions, ideas and methods show a distinction.

He is almost sure to fall and identify himself with the ranks of crime.