i 56 THE MISMEASURE OF MAN
recapitulation discussed in the previous section. To complete the
chain, Lombroso needed only to proclaim the child as inherently
criminal—for the child is an ancestral adult, a living primitive.
Lombroso did not shrink from this necessary implication, and he
branded as criminal the traditional innocent of literature: "One of
the most important discoveries of my school is that in the child up
to a certain age are manifested the saddest tendencies of the crim-
inal man. The germs of delinquency and of criminality are found
normally even in the first periods of human life" (1895, p. 53). Our
impression of the child's innocence is a class bias; we comfortable
folks suppress the natural inclinations of our children: "One who
lives among the upper classes has no idea of the passion babies
have for alcoholic liquor, but among the lower classes it is only too
common a thing to see even suckling babes drink wine and liquors
with wonderful delight (1895, p. 56).*
The stigmata: anatomical, physiological, and social
Lombroso's anatomical stigmata (Fig. 4.1) were, for the most
part, neither pathologies nor discontinuous variations, but extreme
values on a normal curve that approach average measures for the
same trait in great apes. (In modern terms, this is a fundamental
source of Lombroso's error. Arm length varies among humans,
- In Dracula, Professor Van Helsing, in his inimitable broken English, extolled the
argument from recapitulation by branding the Count as a persistent child (and
therefore both a primitive and a criminal as well):
Ah! there I have hope that our man-brains that have been of man so long
and that have not lost the grace of God, will come higher than his child-brain
that lie in his tomb for centuries, that grow not yet to our stature, and that do
only work selfish and therefore small.... He is clever and cunning and
resourceful; but he be not of man-stature as to brain. He be of child-brain
in much. Now this criminal of ours is predestinate to crime also; he too have
child-brain, and it is of the child to do what he have done. The little bird, the
little fish, the little animal learn not by principle but empirically; and when he
learn to do, then there is to him the ground to start from to do more.
4 • 1 A panoply of criminal faces. The frontispiece to the atlas of Lom-
broso's Criminal Man. Group E are German murderers; Group I are bur-
glars (Lombroso tells us that the man without a nose managed to escape
justice for many years by wearing the false nose depicted in the figure on
the left, wearing a derby); "H" are purse snatchers; "A" are shoplifters;
"B," "C," "D," and 'F" are swindlers; while the distinguished gentlemen of
the bottom row declared themselves bankrupt fraudulently.