ppe Fissore had suffered from somnambulism and _pavor nocturnus_
(fear of darkness) when quite a child; when a little older, he used to
get up in the night, walk about and try to throw himself out of the
window. At school he shunned the company of other boys and grew
violently angry when called by his name. When ten years old, he was
bitten by a mad dog and while being tended in Turin by the wife of an
inn-keeper, had an epileptic seizure. At thirteen, he was seized by
another fit, and in falling broke his arm. His restless and capricious
character led him to change his occupation a great many times; he
became, in turn, baker, carpenter, forester, and farm-labourer. He
appeared to have little affection for his mother and still less for his
father, with whom he had come to blows on one occasion. At the age of
twenty, in a quarrel with some companions, one of them struck him with
a sickle and fractured his skull. He had been convicted several times of
theft, assault, etc.

He manifested only a few physical anomalies,--exaggerated facial
asymmetry, due to the disproportionate development of the left side of
his skull, Carrara's lines in the palm of his hands, and a scar
resulting from the fracture of his skull; but the convulsions, the
_pavor nocturnus_, the two fits, and other characteristics showed him to
be an epileptic and an abnormal individual, and explained how he could
have accomplished a murder single-handed, which was moreover rendered
more easy by the fact that the victim had been drinking heavily. Nor was
the crime without a motive, since the murdered man had been robbed of a
large sum of money. The total lack of moral sense that distinguished
Fissore explains why he should have sought to implicate three persons
who had never wronged him for the pleasure of harming and enjoying the
sufferings of others. In fact, during his trial he made many false
accusations against the police merely for the sake of lying, which is
characteristic of degenerates.

Irrefutable alibis and a mass of evidence in favour of the three others
corroborated the anthropological diagnoses and led to their acquittal,
while Fissore was convicted of the crime.

SIMULATION OF DEMENTIA AND APHASIA BY MORALLY INSANE SUBJECT

In August, 1899, a certain E. M. (see Fig. 44) was removed from prison
to an asylum. Although only eighteen, he had been convicted several
times of theft and robbery. As a child he had always shown a strong
dislike to