tend."

Tattooing frequently bears witness to indecency. Of 142 criminals
examined by my father, the tattooing on five showed obscenity of design
and position and furnished also a remarkable proof of the insensibility
to pain characteristic of criminals, the parts tattooed being the most
sensitive of the whole body, and therefore left untouched even by
savages.

Another fact worthy of mention is the extent to which criminals are
tattooed. Thirty-five out of 378 criminals examined by Lacassagne were
decorated literally from head to foot.

In a great many cases, the designs reveal violence of character and a
desire for revenge. A Piedmontese sailor, who had perpetrated fraud and
murder from motives of revenge, bore on his breast between two daggers,
the words: "I swear to revenge myself." Another had written on his
forehead, "Death to the middle classes," with the drawing of a dagger
underneath. A young Ligurian, the leader of a mutiny in an Italian
Reformatory, was tattooed with designs representing all the most
important episodes of his life, and the idea of revenge was paramount.
On his right forearm figured two crossed swords, underneath them the
initials M. N. (of an intimate friend), and on the inner side, traced
longitudinally, the motto: "Death to cowards. Long live our alliance."

Tattooing, as practised by criminals, is a perfect substitute for
writing with symbols and hieroglyphics, and they take a keen pleasure in
this mode of adorning their skins.

Of atavistic origin, also, is the practice, common to members of the
_camorra_, of branding their sweethearts on the face, not from motives
of revenge, but as a sign of proprietorship, like the chiefs of savage
tribes, who mark their wives and other belongings; and the form of
tattooing called "Paranza," which distinguishes the various bands of
malefactors,--the band of the "banner," of the "three arrows," of the
"bell-ringer," of the "Carmelites," etc.

THE CRIMINAL TYPE

All the physical and psychic peculiarities of which we have spoken are
found singly in many normal individuals. Moreover, crime is not always
the result of degeneration and atavism; and, on the other hand, many
persons who are considered perfectly normal are not so in reality.
However, in normal individuals, we never find that accumulation of
physical, psychic, functional, and skeletal anomalies in one and the
same person, that we do in the case of criminals, among whom also entire
fre