xtraordinary agility, that he had been known to
scale steep mountain heights bearing a sheep on his shoulders. His
cynical effrontery was such that he openly boasted of his crimes. On his
death one cold grey November morning, I was deputed to make the
_post-mortem_, and on laying open the skull I found on the occipital
part, exactly on the spot where a spine is found in the normal skull, a
distinct depression which I named _median occipital fossa_, because of
its situation precisely in the middle of the occiput as in inferior
animals, especially rodents. This depression, as in the case of animals,
was correlated with the hypertrophy of the _vermis_, known in birds as
the middle cerebellum.

This was not merely an idea, but a revelation. At the sight of that
skull, I seemed to see all of a sudden, lighted up as a vast plain
under a flaming sky, the problem of the nature of the criminal--an
atavistic being who reproduces in his person the ferocious instincts of
primitive humanity and the inferior animals. Thus were explained
anatomically the enormous jaws, high cheek-bones, prominent superciliary
arches, solitary lines in the palms, extreme size of the orbits,
handle-shaped or sessile ears found in criminals, savages, and apes,
insensibility to pain, extremely acute sight, tattooing, excessive
idleness, love of orgies, and the irresistible craving for evil for its
own sake, the desire not only to extinguish life in the victim, but to
mutilate the corpse, tear its flesh, and drink its blood.

I was further encouraged in this bold hypothesis by the results of my
studies on Verzeni, a criminal convicted of sadism and rape, who showed
the cannibalistic instincts of primitive anthropophagists and the
ferocity of beasts of prey.

The various parts of the extremely complex problem of criminality were,
however, not all solved hereby. The final key was given by another case,
that of Misdea, a young soldier of about twenty-one, unintelligent but
not vicious. Although subject to epileptic fits, he had served for some
years in the army when suddenly, for some trivial cause, he attacked and
killed eight of his superior officers and comrades. His horrible work
accomplished, he fell into a deep slumber, which lasted twelve hours and
on awaking appeared to have no recollection of what had happened.
Misdea, while representing the most ferocious type of animal,
manifested, in addition, all the phenomena of epilepsy, which appeared
to be