iscerning judges in the application of
penalties. In writing his great work, the founder of this School was
inspired by the highest of all human sentiments--pity; but although the
criminal incidentally receives notice, the writings of this School treat
only of the application of the law, not of offenders themselves.

This is the difference between the Classical and the Modern School of
Penal Jurisprudence. The Classical School based its doctrines on the
assumption that all criminals, except in a few extreme cases, are
endowed with intelligence and feelings like normal individuals, and that
they commit misdeeds consciously, being prompted thereto by their
unrestrained desire for evil. The offence alone was considered, and on
it the whole existing penal system has been founded, the severity of the
sentence meted out to the offender being regulated by the gravity of his
misdeed.

The Modern, or Positive, School of Penal Jurisprudence, on the contrary,
maintains that the anti-social tendencies of criminals are the result of
their physical and psychic organisation, which differs essentially from
that of normal individuals; and it aims at studying the morphology and
various functional phenomena of the criminal with the object of curing,
instead of punishing him. The Modern School is therefore founded on a
new science, Criminal Anthropology, which may be defined as the Natural
History of the Criminal, because it embraces his organic and psychic
constitution and social life, just as anthropology does in the case of
normal human beings and the different races.

If we examine a number of criminals, we shall find that they exhibit
numerous anomalies in the face, skeleton, and various psychic and
sensitive functions, so that they strongly resemble primitive races. It
was these anomalies that first drew my father's attention to the close
relationship between the criminal and the savage and made him suspect
that criminal tendencies are of atavistic origin.

When a young doctor at the Asylum in Pavia, he was requested to make a
post-mortem examination on a criminal named Vilella, an Italian Jack the
Ripper, who by atrocious crimes had spread terror in the Province of
Lombardy. Scarcely had he laid open the skull, when he perceived at the
base, on the spot where the internal occipital crest or ridge is found
in normal individuals, a small hollow, which he called _median occipital
fossa_ (see Fig. 1). This abnormal character was corr