It is a fact well known to biologists that in all living beings qualities often occur that did not appear in their immediate forebears but in more remote generations. This reappearance of qualities is called atavism. Its importance has been too much exaggerated, however, and it has been made into a magic word with which, it has been thought, everything could be explained, including crime. The line of reasoning has been as follows: crime is one of the ordinary phenomena among savage peoples, and must therefore have been so among the ancestors of the civilized peoples. It is observed that among the criminals of our day there are more of the anatomical stigmata indicating atavism than among non-criminals; consequently crime is a phenomenon of atavism! There are numerous errors in this reasoning. “Since we are treating the question of crime, we must first of all know what is understood by crime, must give a definition of it indicating what crime corresponds to physiologically, and to what order of anatomical characteristics the physiological tendency to crime corresponds. Considered in themselves, these acts suppose only the existence of a conformation permitting, and of needs demanding, their accomplishment. If such a conformation and such needs no longer exist in the normal state among civilized peoples, where nevertheless the acts are frequent, it would be proper to examine the authors of them for abnormal characteristics; not merely any abnormal characteristics, but characteristics, anatomical or physiological, that it would be possible to connect with these aptitudes and needs that have become abnormal.” [165] Among the anatomical stigmata observed in criminals in prison there are several which, considered by themselves, have nothing abnormal about them; none of them would serve to characterize criminals. We often find, for example, that murderers have relatively large jaws, which are ordinarily thus an index of a conformation disposed to brutality; “but this brutality is absolutely of the same order as that of men compared with women; it is a masculine characteristic, and the masculine conformation is indubitably favorable to crimes of violence much more than the feminine; but happily it happens that most men, in civilized countries, live under conditions in which their natural brutality does not prevent their being very peaceable citizens, though it would be imprudent to molest them. Very vigorous men are ordinarily endowed with square and very solid jaws; they are men for attack or defense, who may be very useful to society or very harmful, as the case may be. Given to acting vigorously and brutally, this they may be, but inclined to crime they are not, any more than the men with small jaws, whose mildness is often the effect of muscular weakness, and who, though little given to striking and breaking down doors, nevertheless know how to be brutal and violent in their own way.” [166]