I believe both these ideas to be entirely wrong. I was confirmed in my opinion last year when I visited many of the largest prisons in the United States; for I found there, as I have found in England, a complete absence among the prisoners of those physical and facial peculiarities that we are taught to believe differentiate criminals from ordinary citizens. Speaking on this subject to the American Congress at Washington on October 4, 1910, Sir Evelyn Ruggles-Brise, K.C.B., the esteemed chairman of our Prison Commissioners, made the following statement— “There is no criminal type. Nothing in the past has so retarded progress as the conviction, deeply rooted and widespread, that the criminal is a class by himself, different from all others, with a tendency to crime, of which certain peculiarities of body are the outward and visible signs. “This superstition, for such I think it must be called, was, you know, strengthened and encouraged by the findings of the Italian school. “It is not based upon disinterested and exact investigation, and not only has the progress of the science of criminal anthropology been retarded by this conception, but it accounts for the unfavourable and sceptical attitude which we still find in many places towards any attempt to reform the criminal. “It is my own belief that the assumed co-relation between the mental and physical characteristics of a man is a superstition and fallacy. I do not believe that a murderer can be revealed by his frontal curve, or a thief by his bulging forehead or the shape of his nose. In England, we have been at great pains during the last two or three years to disprove, by scientific and exact investigations, this popular conception of a criminal. We have personally examined three thousand of our worst convicts, men sentenced to penal servitude and guilty of every form of crime. With regard to each we have collected and tabulated no less than ninety-six statements, that is, measurements, family history, mental and bodily characteristics, etc. The tabulation is now proceeding at the Biometric Laboratory, University College, London, under the direction of Dr. Karl Pearson. The results will be published shortly, and we are only able at present to say that so far no evidence whatever has emerged from this investigation confirming the existence of criminal types such as Lombroso and his disciples have asserted. “And, in fact, both with regard to measurements and the presence of physical anomalies in criminals, these statistics present a startling conformity with similar statistics of the law-abiding. I thought it might interest this assembly to know that this investigation has been undertaken. “Its results will be what most of us would have anticipated, but it will be a scientific result, and will serve to break down the vulgar superstition that criminals are a special type, and as such, in many cases beyond the reach of reform.”