The criminal / by Havelock Ellis.

  • Havelock Ellis
Date:
1895
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The criminal / by Havelock Ellis. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    who had made some attempt at cerebral localisation, he studied the brain, sought to differentiate the functions of its various parts, and the effects of its varying development on the skull. For Gall the varying development of the brain was the cause of the divergent mental and moral qualities of the individual ; he was firmly convinced that all the facts of psychical life are rooted in the physical organisation ; he wished to write the natural history of every primitive moral and intellectual force, in health as well as in disease. To the best of his ability he carried out this programme in detail, by an unceasing study of all the varieties of the brain and of the living head that he could find ; he pursued his studies throughout Europe, in lunatic asylums and in prisons, as well as among the ordinary popu- lation, and he foresaw the extent of the applications of the science he was opening up to medicine and to law, to morality and to education. While his woi'k extended far beyond the borders of what we should now call criminal anthropology,^ he devoted much attention to the problems of the criminal organisation, and even to its varieties, many of his observations according well with the results of recent investigation. More than this, following Galen and Diderot (who had written, fifty years earlier, The evil-doer is one whom 1 This is the term now generally used to signify the science of the criminal. It is, however, open to objection. Criminal Psychology has been suggested, but is somewhat narrow. Professor Liszt has proposed Criminal Biology, and at the last International Congress of Criminal .-Anthropology, Topinard suggested Criminalogy. Criminal Anthropology, however, is so widely used that I have not ventured to introduce any substitute. The reader must remember that criminal anthropology, although related to general anthropology, is not merely a branch of tliat science.
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