University of Virginia Library

Section 92. (b) Heredity.[1]

However important the question of heredity may be to lawyers psychologically, its application to legal needs is impossible. It would require, on the one hand, the study of all the literature concerning it, together with the particular teachings of Darwin and his disciples, and of Lombroso and his. The criminal-psychological study of it has not yet been established. The unfounded, adventurous, and arbitrary assertions of the Lombrosists have been contradicted, especially through the efforts of German investigators. But others, like Debierre in Lille, Sernoff in Moscow, Taine, Drill, Marchand have also had occasion to controvert the Italian positivists. At the same time, the problem of heredity is not dead, and will not die. This is being shown particularly in the retort of Marchand concerning the examinations he made with M. E. Koslow, in the asylum for juvenile offenders founded by the St. Petersburg Anthropological Society. Between Buckle, who absolutely denies heredity, and the latest of the modern doctrines, there are a number of intermediate views, one of which may possibly be true. There is an enormous literature which every criminalist should study.[2]

Nevertheless, this literature can tell us nothing about the legitimacy of the premise of heredity. Every educated man still believes Darwin's doctrines, and the new theories that seek to emancipate themselves from it do so only by pushing them out of the big front door, and insinuating them through the little back door. But according to Bois-Reymond Darwinism is only the principle of the hereditary maintenance of the child's variation from its parents. Everybody knows of real inherited characters, and many examples of it are cited. According to Ribot, suicide is hereditary; according to Despine, kleptomania; according to Lucas, vigorous sexuality; according to Darwin, hand-writing, etc. Our personal acquaintances show the inheritance of features, figure, habits, intellectual properties, particularly cleverness, such as, sense of space and time, capacity for orientation, interests, diseases, etc. Even ideas have their ancestors like men, and we learn from the study of animals how instincts, capacities, even acquired ones, are progressively inherited. And yet we refuse to believe in the congenital criminal! But the contradiction is only apparent.

A study of the works of Darwin, Weismann, DeVries, etc., shows us indubitably that no authority asserts the inheritance of great alterations appearing for the first time in an individual. And as to the inheritance of acquired characteristics, some authorities assert this to be impossible.

Until Darwin the old law of species demanded that definite traits of a species should not change through however long a period. The Darwinian principle indicates the inheritance of minute variations, intensified by sexual selection, and, in the course of time, developed into great variations. Now nobody will deny that the real criminal is different from the majority of other people. That this difference is great and essential, is inferred from the circumstance that a habit a single characteristic, an unhappy inclination, etc., does not constitute a criminal. If a man is a thief it will not be asserted that he is otherwise like decent people, varying only in the accidental inclination to theft. We know that, besides the inclination to theft, we may assign him a dislike for honest work, lack of moral power, indifference to the laws of honor when caught, the lack of real religion,—in short, the inclination to theft must be combined with a large number of very characteristic qualities in order to make a thief of a man. There must, in a word, be a complete and profound change in his whole nature. Such great changes in the individual are never directly inherited; only particular properties can be

inherited, but these do not constitute a criminal. Hence, the son of a criminal need not in his turn be a criminal.

This does not imply that in the course of generations characters might not compound themselves until a criminal type is developed, but this is as rare as the development of new species among the animals. Races are frequently selected; species develop rarely.