ing, when applied to sexual
aberrations, helps us to understand how a non-ethical habit, based on
scarcity of women, survived as a social and chivalrous institution among
the civilised Hellenes.

Lombroso traces the growth of justice in criminal affairs, and the
establishment of pains and penalties, up to the instinct of revenge and
the despotic selfishness of chiefs in whom the whole property of savage
tribes, including women, was vested. This section of his work concludes
with the following remarkable sentence (p. 96): "The universal diffusion
of crime which we have demonstrated at a certain remote epoch, and its
gradual disappearance as a consequence of new crimes springing up,
traces of which are still discoverable in our penal codes [he means
revenge, the egotism of princes, and ecclesiastical rapacity], are
calculated even more than the criminality of brutes to make us doubt of
what metaphysicians call eternal justice, and indicate the real cause of
the perpetual reappearance of crime among civilised races, namely
atavism."

Having established this principle, Lombroso proceeds to trace the
atavism of criminality in children. He shows that just as the human
embryo passes through all forms of lower lives, so men and women in
their infancy exactly reproduce the moral type of savages. Ungovernable
rage, revengeful instincts, jealousy, envy, lying, stealing, cruelty,
laziness, vanity, sexual proclivities, imperfect family affections, a
general bluntness of the ethical sense, are common qualities of
children, which the parent and the teacher strive to control or to
eradicate by training. "The child, considered as a human being devoid of
moral sense, presents a perfect picture of what doctors call moral
insanity, and I prefer to classify as inborn crime" (p. 97). "All
species of anomalous sexual appetite, with the exception of those
dependent upon senile decadence, make their appearance in childhood,
together with the other criminal tendencies" (p. 117).

Lombroso arrives, then, at the conclusion that what civilised humanity
calls crime and punishes, is the law of nature in brutes, persists as a
normal condition among savages, and displays itself in the habits and
instincts of children. The moral instinct is therefore slowly elaborated
out of crime in the course of generations by whole races, and in the
course of infancy and adolescence in the individual. The habitual
criminal, who remains a criminal in his maturity,