J 54 THE MISMEASURE OF MAN
lower animals are criminal. If some men look like apes, but apes be
kind, then the argument fails. Thus, Lombroso devoted the first
part of his major work (Criminal Man, first published in 1876) to
what must be the most ludicrous excursion into anthropomor-
phism ever published—an analysis of the criminal behavior of ani-
mals. He cites, for example, an ant driven by rage to kill and
dismember an aphid; an adulterous stork who, with her lover,
murdered her husband; a criminal association of beavers who
ganged up to murder a solitary compatriot; a male ant, without
access to female reproductives, who violated a (female) worker with
atrophied sexual organs, causing her great pain and death; he even
refers to the insect eating of certain plants as an "equivalent of
crime" (Lombroso, 1887, pp. 1-18).
Lombroso then proceeded to the next logical step: comparison
of criminals with "inferior" groups. "I would compare," wrote a
French supporter, "the criminal to a savage appearing, by atavism,
in modern society; we may think that he was born a criminal
because he was born a savage" (Bordier, 1879, p. 284). Lombroso
ventured into ethnology to identify criminality as normal behavior
among inferior people. He wrote a small treatise (Lombroso, 1896)
on the Dinka of the Upper Nile. In it, he spoke of their heavy
tattooing and high threshold for pain—at puberty they break their
incisors with a hammer. They display apish stigmata as normal
parts of their anatomy: "their nose ... is not only flattened, but
trilobed, resembling that of monkeys." His colleague G. Tarde
wrote that some criminals "would have been the ornament and the
moral aristocracy of a tribe of Red Indians" (in Ellis, 1910, p. 254).
Havelock Ellis made much of a claim that criminals and inferior
people often do not blush. "Inability to blush has always been con-
sidered the accompaniment of crime and shamelessness. Blushing
is also very rare among idiots and savages. The Spaniards used to
say of the South American Indians: 'How can one trust men who
do not know how to blush' " (1910, p. 138). And how far did the
Incas get by trusting Pizarro?
Lombroso constructed virtually all his arguments in a manner
that precluded their defeat, thus making them scientifically vac-
uous. He cited copious numerical data to lend an air of objectivity
to his work, but it remained so vulnerable that even most of Broca s
school turned against the theory of atavism. Whenever Lombroso
encountered a contrary fact, he performed some mental gymnas-