It is interesting to note that Topinard, the distinguished anthropologist, who has bestowed some severe and not unmerited criticism on portions of Lombroso’s work,[86] while accepting the professional theory of crime, by no means considers that it is sufficient to explain the whole of the facts; remembering the teaching of Lélut and Baillarger, under whom he had studied mental disease, he calls in the aid of the morbid element:--“Criminals constitute a special professional category in society, in the same way as men of letters, men of science, artists, priests, the labouring classes, etc., but a complex category in which the most diverse elements enter: the insane or those predisposed to insanity, epileptics and those predisposed to epilepsy, the alcoholic, the microcephalic, the macrocephalic, those predisposed by some vice of organisation or of development, anterior or posterior to birth, betraying itself sometimes by very evident anatomical anomalies, those who are predisposed by family traditions and inclinations, those whose moral instincts are perverted by individual education and social environment, and finally those who are criminals by accident, without preparation or predisposition.”[87] Professional characters will carry us a long way when we are seeking to account for natural social groups. But in the anti-social groups another and more morbid element enters. It is indeed largely the presence of morbid elements which gives these groups their anti-social character. (_f_) The morbid element in criminality has sometimes been too strongly emphasised, but it would be idle to attempt to deny its importance. The frequency with which insanity appears among criminals, even when the influence of imprisonment may with considerable certainty be excluded, is well ascertained. Of recent years also the close connection between criminality and epilepsy and general paralysis has often been shown. I have several times pointed out that the resemblances between criminals considered as a class and the insane so considered are by no means great; at many points they are strongly contrasted. The resemblances with epileptics, on the other hand, are anthropologically very marked, as Lombroso was the first to point out in detail. He has also observed that those regions of Italy which produce most epileptics produce also most criminals. Epilepsy has a certain relationship to insanity; it tends naturally to weak-mindedness, although some of the world’s greatest men have been epileptics; and there is in epilepsy a tendency to the development of brutal, unnatural, and bloodthirsty instincts. The slighter and more concealed forms of epilepsy offer also a very fruitful field for investigation in this respect.[88]