Tenchini has pointed out (and the observation has since been confirmed)
that the frontal crest is often stronger and more prominent in criminals.
In normal skulls he found it 3-4 millimetres in length; in criminals
frequently 5-6 mm. It is also larger in the insane and lower races, and
relatively larger in orang-outangs. It may signify precocious union of the
two parts of the frontal bone with consequent arrest of brain development.
The presence of a median occipital fossa has been specially noted by
Lombroso, sometimes in connection with hypertrophy of the vermis of the
cerebellum, as among the lower apes, in the human fœtus between the third
and fourth months, and in some lower races.
Lack of cranial symmetry is one of the most marked features of the
criminal skull, although it has not often at present been subjected to
exact measurement.[18] It must be remembered that every skull, criminal or
non-criminal, is deficient in strict symmetry (and, indeed, every part of
the body likewise), and that statistics therefore are here of little
value; it is simply a question of the amount of asymmetry; and two
observers going over the same series of skulls would almost certainly come
to different conclusions. They would probably, however, both find the
proportion of asymmetrical heads greater in the criminal than in the
ordinary series.
All these cranial abnormalities are found occasionally in ordinary
persons; very rarely are they found combined in normal persons to the
extent that they are found among instinctive criminals. Thus Lombroso,
when he examined the skull of Gasparone, a famous brigand of the beginning
of the century, whose name still lives in legends and poems, found
microcephaly of the frontal region, a wormian bone, eurigmatism, increase
in the orbital capacity, oxycephaly, and extreme dolichocephaly.
Mingazzini found that out of thirty criminals eight presented brains and
skulls of a weight and capacity only found in submicrocephalic subjects;
that several of these showed, either in brain or skull, or both, the union
of several anomalies; and that in the skulls of other six the abnormal
appearances were so manifold as to present an aspect which might be
called “completely teratologic.”[19] Most of these anomalies are found
much more frequently in the male than in the female skull. If, however,
the criminal woman is compared with the normal woman, she is found to
approach more closely to the normal man than the latter does; while the
corresponding character (feminility) is not found so often in the criminal
as in the normal man, except among pæderasts and some thieves. It may also
be mentioned that nearly all these anomalies are much more rarely found in
the insane.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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