d. When only eight, on leaving home early every morning to go
to work, he would secretly throw all the milk left at the neighbours'
doors into the dust-bin, then he accused the janitor of stealing it and
got him dismissed. A year later, he nearly succeeded in causing the
arrest of a pawnbroker, whom he accused of having lent him money on a
cloak, it being illegal in Italy to accept anything in pawn from a
minor. The cloak, however, was discovered by his mother hidden in the
cellar. At ten years of age, he alleged that his father had brutally
ill-treated him, and as severe marks and bruises on his body gave colour
to the accusation, the poor man was arrested. The marks, however, were
self-inflicted.

Another boy, a certain Man..., a peasant from the Val d'Aosta, an
Alpine valley in Piedmont, where cretinism is indigenous, exhibited
perverse tendencies from his earliest infancy. When twelve years old, he
killed his companion in a squabble over an egg. (See Fig. 13.)

In the above-mentioned cases, the subjects all belonged to well-to-do or
honest families and the pathological heredity was therefore exclusively
nervous, not criminal. For this reason, the parents were struck by the
abnormal depravity of their sons and had them medically examined and
treated, thus discovering that they were morally insane. If, on the
other hand, the parents had been criminals and had, themselves, set a
bad example, nobody would have supposed that these depraved tendencies
were innate in the children or had developed precociously. The fact of
the prevalence of moral insanity in neurotic families (with frequent
cases of lunacy, alcoholism, etc.) rather than in those of criminal
tendencies appears at first sight strange, but according to the new
theory advanced by my father, the criminal is a mentally diseased
person; and we shall see in a later chapter that the heredity of insane,
neurotic, and dipsomaniac parents is completely equivalent to a criminal
heredity.

=FIG. 12
BOY MORALLY INSANE
(see page 55)=

=FIG. 13
BOY MORALLY INSANE
(see page 56)=

_Proofs of Analogy._ Thus the genesis and early manifestations, which
might have been diverse, really constitute a counter-proof. Careful
anamnesis shows that both born criminals and the morally insane begin at
a very early age to exhibit symptoms of the morbid tendencies which make
them such a danger to society, and if the general public and the police,
when such cases ar