i6o THE MISMEASURE OF MAN
similarity with more distant, and even more "primitive," creatures:
he compared prominent canine teeth and a flattened palate with
the anatomy of lemurs and rodents, an oddly shaped occipital con-
dyle (area for articulation of skull and vertebral column) with the
normal condyles of cattle and pigs (1896, p. 188), and an abnormal
heart with the usual conformation in sirenians (a group of rare
marine mammals). He even postulated a meaningful similarity
between the facial asymmetry of some criminals and flatfishes with
both eyes on the upper surface of their bodies (1911, p. 373)!
Lombroso bolstered his study of specific defects with a general
anthropometric survey of the criminal head and body—a sample
of 383 crania from dead criminals, plus general proportions mea-
sured for 3,839 among the living. As an indication of Lombroso's
style, consider the numerical basis of his most important claim—
that criminals generally have smaller brains than normal people,
even though a few criminals have very large brains (see p. 126).*
Lombroso (1911, p. 365) and his disciples (Ferri, 1897, p. 8, for
example) repeated this claim continually. Yet Lombroso's data
show no such thing. Fig. 4.3 presents the frequency distributions
for cranial capacity measured by Lombroso in 121 male criminals
and 328 upright men. You don't need fancy statistics to see that the
two distributions differ very little—despite Lombroso's conclusion
that, in criminals, "the small capacities dominate and the very great
are rare" (1887, p. 144). I have reconstructed the original data
from Lombroso's tables of percentages within classes and calculate
average values of 1,450 cc for criminal heads and 1,484 cc for law-
abiding heads. The standard deviations of the two distributions (a
general measure of spread about the average) do not differ signif-
icantly. This means that the larger range of variation in the law-
abiding sample—an important point for Lombroso since it
extended the maximum capacity for decent folk to 100 cc above•Other standard craniometrical arguments were often pressed into service by crim-
inal anthropology. For example, as early as 1843, Voisin invoked the classical argu-
ment of front and back (see pp.129-135) to place criminals among the animals.
He studied five hundred young offenders and reported deficiencies in the forward
and upper parts of their brain—the supposed seat of morality and rationality. He
wrote (1843, pp. 100-101):
Their brains are at a minimum of development in their anterior and supe-
rior parts, in the two parts that make us what we are and that place us above
the animals and make us men. They [criminal brains] are placed by their
nature... entirely outside the human species.