virus is its swiftly fatal effect on birds. A stricken child, though
half crazed with fear, may run a distance of three miles before
paralysis begins to impede its motions; a squirrel will escape to its
nest in the top of the tree, only to come forth again and topple down
in its delirium; but a bird drops as if he had swallowed a dose of
prussic acid. Serpent virus is specifically a bird poison; in other
words, it acts instantaneously in cases where a few moments' delay
would defeat the purpose of the snap bite. Wounded rodents will not
run very far and can be relied upon to come out of their holes; but a
bitten bird, unless promptly paralyzed, would fly out of sight and
drop in distant thickets, beyond the ken of its destroyer. And of all
bird-killing reptiles the fer-de-lance is the most destructive. The
Spaniards have varied its bill of fare by importing the wherewithal of
an occasional rabbit stew, but during the preceding ages it had to
subsist on poultry, like a popular circuit preacher--the _hutia_ rat
having developed a talent for avoiding its haunts.
The alleged _horror naturalis_ of serpents is perhaps not more
deep-rooted than the aversion to cats; at all events, the West Indians
have overcome it sufficiently to prefer rat-killing snakes to
tabbies. In thousands of rancho cabins a pet serpent of the genus
_coluber_ may be seen gliding noiselessly along the rafters, or slip
through the crack of a floor plank to reach the penetralia of the
basement, where the death shriek of rodents soon after announces the
result of its activity. Aristocratic Creoles relegate it to their
stables, but the tenants of numerous backwood _casuchas_ furnish it a
cotton-stuffed bed box, and reward its services with a weekly dish of
milk. There are several species of large river serpents, and one true
boa, the Cuban _matapollos_, or chicken-killer, that attains a length
of eighteen feet, and has been known to use its supernumerary coils
for the purpose of cracking the ribs of a hound flying to the
assistance of the barnyard rooster.
In addition to the above-mentioned jungle tortoise there are several
land turtles of the genus _chlemmys_, and thousands of chelidonians
are annually caught on Samana Bay, southern Porto Rico, St. Vincent,
the Isle of Pines, and the north coast of Matanzas, Cuba. Those of
Santiago Bay have gradually been exterminated, but a large number of
West Indian fishing waters are practically inexhaustible. A specialist
like Agassiz might haul nondescripts from scores of Haytian coast
rivers, and the angle fishers of the Cuban sierra brooks can hook an
equally interesting reproduction of an Appalachian species.
"Some of our companions had to eke out a haul with crawfish," says the
traveler Esterman, "but our own string of sundries included a puzzle
for naturalists. We had caught some twenty brook trout, absolutely
indistinguishable from the species found in the head waters of the
Tennessee River. Where did they come from? Had they crossed the Gulf
of Mexico and ascended the rapids of half a hundred rivers, or had
Nature copied her own handiwork in such details as the small dark
dots below each red spot, and the occasional breaks in the lines of
the silver-white keel streaks?"
The perch of the forest rivers include several nest-building
varieties, and the sportsmen of Kingston, Jamaica, often amuse
themselves with target practice at a species of rock fish that come
clear out of the water and bask, like coots, on the harbor cliffs.
With every mile farther south the number and variety of the finned
aborigines become more infinite, and the fishermen of the estuary of
San Juan de Porto Rico alone catch pompanos, mullets, cavalli, red
snappers, chiquillos (a kind of sardelles), sea bass, dorados,
skip-jack, angelfish, skate, ray, sheepshead, garfish, torpedo-fish,
devilfish or giant ray, cobia, hogfish, croakers, shark, and
coryphenes.
[Illustration: FLYING FISH (_Exocoetus volitans_); FLYING GURNARD OR
FLYING ROBIN (_Cephalacanthus volitans_). (From Baskett's Story of the
Fishes.)]
The tiger of the sea, the great white shark, occasionally visits the
harbor waters of Cuba, and has been known to seize barefooted peons,
surf-bathing horses in the next neighborhood of Morro Castle, and drag
them under so suddenly that their companions were unable to account
for their disappearance till the foam of the breakers became flecked
with blood.
[Illustration: BUTTERFLY FISH.]
That champion of marine man-eaters is as smooth as a hypocrite, and
hides its double row of horrible fangs under a slippery nose, while
the little butterfly fish tries its best to disguise its helplessness
with a crest of spiny fins. Its length rarely exceeds four inches, and
it can be handled with impunity, but its spines are just rigid enough
to entangle it in tufts of gulf weed, and in company of equally tiny
sea horses and goldfish, it can often be seen in the aquariums of the
Jamaica seaport towns.
[_To be continued._]
A STUDY OF LUIGI LUCCHENI (ASSASSIN OF THE EMPRESS OF AUSTRIA).
BY CESARE LOMBROSO.
[Illustration: FIG. 1.--LUIGI LUCCHENI.]
There is not an enlightened person in the world who does not deplore
the anarchist crime committed last summer by Luccheni in Geneva upon
the unfortunate Empress of Austria. With grief is associated the duty
of inquiring what could have been the origin of a misdeed which
besides being cruel had the vice of being absurd, falling as it did
upon a poor woman near the tomb, who was ready to welcome death, and
who had no political influence, by an assassin who had not suffered
any offense from her or from her government, and who further had the
impudence to boast of his crime as if it had been a heroic act.
We begin our inquiry by seeking for an explanation of the act by means
of a study of the person of the murderer in conformity with the rules
of the anthropological school.
Luigi Luccheni is the illegitimate son of a Parmesan servant now
living in America, and her master, who lived in the Parmesan
territory, a priest, unbalanced and intemperate, who sent her when she
was pregnant to Paris to be confined. There she abandoned her newborn
babe to a foundling asylum. The child was sent thence to his native
country and placed, till he was nine years old, with a Parmesan family
named Monici, of whom the father was a shoemaker, very poor and
intemperate, and the mother immoral.
After he was nine years old he was put with a family named Nicasi,
good people, but very poor--peasants, or rather mendicants, so that he
too became a mendicant, wandering with his comrades through the
streets and pilfering till he was thirteen years old. It appears from
what Dr. Guerini, of Parma, writes me that during this time he had
epileptic fits. When twelve years old he went to school, where he
appeared bright but impulsive, and on one occasion in his anger
destroyed the portrait of the king.
From the age of fourteen to that of nineteen he was a servant, and had
two masters, and wandered in Liguria, Switzerland, and Austria, where
he was arrested, sent back to his country, and prohibited from showing
himself in the east. He then entered the military service, where he
conducted himself very well, incurring only light punishments for
assaulting a comrade and for helping a sergeant get out of the
barracks at night. He was so liked by his superiors and comrades that
when, three years afterward, in 1897, he left the army, Captain the
Prince de Vera engaged him as his servant. In this service he
exhibited great affection for children, and, what is strange, he was
so good a monarchist that he was scandalized that at the commemoration
of the deceased Cavolotti, in Naples, the orator was permitted to
praise him as a political man without interruption from the delegate.
One day, irritated because he had been denied some permission, he
abruptly took his leave, declaring that he was not born to be a
servant, and returned to Switzerland to work as a marble polisher. But
even from Switzerland he kept continually imploring his old employer
to take him back, declaring in a letter which revealed symptoms of a
persistent delirium that "he probably would not receive him again
because he did not go to mass"; which indicates substantially that he
had not that repugnance for the anti-anarchical life of a servant
which he manifested previously and afterward.[O]
[Footnote O: It appears that he afterward made the strange request for
an anarchist to be appointed guard of the prison, and was irritated
when it was denied. (See A. Gautier, Le procès Luccheni. Vienna,
1899.)]
Whether all at once or not he became an extreme anarchist. He signed
and composed anarchist hymns. Suspected by his comrades of not being
zealous enough, and also perhaps of being a spy, he decided to strike
a blow against some prince; he chose the empress as his victim
possibly because he had suffered his first annoyance in Austria. He,
who had never killed a fly, had a rude instrument prepared--a file;
practiced for a considerable time, perhaps a month, at striking with
it, and having committed the crime, tried to escape. When stopped by
two citizens he did not resist, and behaved in a very different way
from common criminals, therein exhibiting a tinge of insanity. He, for
example, although he knew French very well, denied it and demanded an
interpreter in the interrogations. He sang and laughed continually,
and was glad that he had dealt his victim a good blow, and that he had
struck deep with the instrument, boasting that he had used a file
instead of a dagger. He was, besides, solicitous of publicity,
declaring to the reporters and the judges that he had done the deed
all alone, that he had left his captain to accomplish his idea, that
he had been an anarchist for thirteen years, etc. In two ungrammatical
and very long letters to the journal _Don Marzio_, in Naples, chosen
evidently because he had seen it at his master's, he declared that he
was not a criminal born, as Lombroso would have it, nor a madman, and
that he had not been incited by misery but by conviction, because, if
all would do as he had done, middle-class society would soon
disappear. He knew that this single assassination would be of no
avail, but he had, nevertheless, committed it for an example.
[Illustration: FIG. 2.--EXTRACT FROM A LETTER BY LUCCHENI.]
He wrote to the President of the Swiss Confederation that he would
rather be tried at Lucerne, because the death penalty was in force
there, and repeated the statement to the judges; he wrote to his
master that he was more worthy of him than ever; he replied to the
reporters and the judges who reproached him with having killed a
helpless woman, that as for that, if she had been a child, but a
prince, he would have killed her all the same. At another time he
said, in a wild way: "I killed her because she did not work; whoever
does not work should not eat, and I was not going to work for her"--a
reason which would be as good for the slaughter of several million
persons.
Curious and important is the remark of Luccheni that "Crispi would not
have killed her because he was a thief"; an evident proof of the
complete lack of moral sense in anarchists,[P] who like primitive men
confound the crime with the deed, and regard criminality as a sort of
merit, a seal of fraternity; which demonstrates that the anarchistic
practice, if not its theory, is an equivalence of crimes.
[Footnote P: See my Delitto politico, Part III, and Gli Anarcici,
second edition.]
When asked if he had never committed blood-crimes, he replied that he
had never had anything to do with courts, not even as a witness--which
was found to be true--but "I entertained the idea this time, and acted
upon it."
Luccheni is a man of medium stature, about 1.63 metre, with very
thick, light chestnut hair, stout, with dark-gray, half-closed eyes,
roundish ears, heavy eyebrows, voluminous cheek bones and jaw
prognatic, low forehead, very brachycephalic (cephalic index 88). He
has, therefore, a number of characteristics of degeneration common to
epileptics and insane criminals. On the other hand, his handwriting,
with its minute characters, especially in the writing of past years,
indicates a mild feminine disposition, with little energy of
character. This is especially seen in an autograph of 1896, which was
procured for me by Dr. Guerini, who got it from his patient (see Fig.
2). This characteristic, which was extremely conspicuous in Caserio
when he was near his crime, was also apparent in the assailant of
General Rocha. I have likewise observed it to be very conspicuous in
epileptics and hysterical persons; and it corresponds, according as
they are in their psychical spasm or out of it, with a real double
personality provoked by their disease. In one, as I have shown in
_L'Uomo Delinquente_, they write signatures that cover a whole page in
their larger diameter, while the signature in the normal state is
often smaller than the average (see Fig. 3).
[Illustration: FIG. 3.--MACROGRAPHIC AND MICROGRAPHIC WRITING BY THE
SAME EPILEPTIC.]
The same double personality that is apparent in the writing is
attested in the psychology. We have seen that Luccheni was kind to
children, that he was a good servant, characteristics quite opposed to
the anarchistic nature, and a genial companion; a man who in Africa
was enthusiastically fond of military life; who, a little while
before, when he was in the service of the captain, had expressed
extreme monarchical sentiments; and finally, when he had become an
anarchist, again asked his master to be restored to his service. This
double personality is another of the essential characteristics of
hysteria and epilepsy.
I have recently studied an epileptoid degenerate who has a sound mind,
and, at least in his normal state, is quiet and gentle. But as soon as
he has taken hardly more than ninety grammes of alcohol (96° proof) he
becomes a wild anarchist, with fierce impulses and hallucinations, of
which he has no recollection two hours afterward, or even charges them
to his comrades. In this case a double personality is revealed, the
demonstration of which is completed by alterations of the visual field
and of the touch.
We have, then, in Luccheni a degenerate and probably epileptic person
descended from an alcoholic father. Although he affirms that he is not
insane or a criminal born, he is a little of both, for he is epileptic
and hysterical, so that his denial is already a beginning of a proof
of disease. Luccheni also confirms what I have tried to demonstrate in
my _Delitto politico_--that the most frequent organic cause of similar
morbid impulses of a political character is hystero-epilepsy; for not
only do the declarations of some of his countrymen point to epilepsy,
and the characteristics of degeneration in the skull confirm it, but
his inheritance from an alcoholic father and that impulsiveness and
that double personality, which make him pass from the gentlest of men
to the cruelest, and which is reflected in the macrography alternating
with the micrography of the intervals between the spasms, are
accumulative evidence of it.
I have demonstrated the hysterical and epileptic basis in the
anarchists and regicides Felicot, Monges, and Caserio, and
particularly in a vagabond anarchist, full of cranial anomalies, who
told me, when I questioned him concerning political reforms, "Do not
speak to me of them, for as soon as I begin to think about them I am
taken with a vertigo and fall down"; so that it seems to me possible
to establish a psycho-epileptic equivalent in extreme political
innovators, an equivalent which is further manifest in their vanity,
rising sometimes to megalomania, in their intermittent geniality, and
especially in their great impulsiveness. There was also latent in
Luccheni an indirect disposition to suicide, which I have found in
other political criminals, like Oliva, Nobiling, and Passananti,[Q]
who, having conceived a dislike for the king, made an attempt on his
life; and especially in Henry, who rejected the defense of his
advocate and his mother based on the insanity of his father, remarking
that it was the advocate's business to defend, his to die; and in that
Roumanian who was photographed in a portrait that I have reproduced,
in the act of committing suicide.[R] Luccheni, too, believed he would
be condemned to death, and was much disappointed when he learned that
there was no such penalty in the canton where he committed the crime.
[Footnote Q: See my Delitto politico, 1890.]
[Footnote R: Ibid.]
It may have been morbid vanity that prompted the exclamation he was
heard to make, "I wanted to kill some great person, so as to get my
name in the papers" (Gautier).
But while an organic, individual cause was good for a third in
Luccheni's crime, he was much more influenced by the atmosphere in
which he lived. An illegitimate child, left in one of those nurseries
which are real nests of crime and graver disorders, then consigned to
a very poor and not always moral family of mendicant habits, having
learned nothing except to beg and wander, he found such modes of
subsistence as he could (notice the uncertainty and plurality of his
occupations, indicating lack of assiduity--servant, soldier, marble
polisher, and in the beginning peasant); he found, we might say, as
the most constant condition the infelicity which radiated around him
from every quarter, and, reflecting the worst, urged him to this way
of suicide. We should recollect, too, what Frattini said: "Was it
hunger brought me to this?" and the anarchist whom Hamon speaks of:
"When I began to question the unfortunates of the hospital, it had a
frightful effect on me; I comprehended the need of solidarity and
became an anarchist"; and as another one said to the same Hamon: "I
became an anarchist when I saw my comrades begging for work with their
faces bathed in tears, and was indignant over it." Caserio wept when
he thought of the lot of his Lombard companions in misery. These
criminals by passion, by altruism, are, as Burdeau wrote, veritable
philanthropic assassins. They kill recklessly for the love of men.
Epilepsy and hysteria in Luccheni are explained by his abrupt passage
from one condition to the other, and by the conversion of factional
passion in him into a criminal act. But there are epileptics and
criminals everywhere; yet persons thus disordered in Norway and Sweden
are not transformed into anarchists; nor in Switzerland and England,
whither people resort from all parts of the world, and where, when
anarchy shows itself, it is like a meteor falling to the earth from
the extra-planetary regions--wholly isolated and opposed to the world
around it.
The most important cause of this transformation is the misery that
weighs upon our unfortunate country, evidence of which comes in from
every side even upon those who are not miserable themselves. If even
in the latest days Luccheni had been living comfortably, he could not,
with the excessively morbid altruism that dominated him, have failed
to feel this misery, which is so profound and general in Italy.
Not much erudition is required to demonstrate the immense economical
embarrassment of Italy as contrasted with other countries when it is
known that we pay about five hundred times its value for salt, that
bread is growing dearer every day, and that the amount consumed
diminishes one tenth every year in these lands.
It was, therefore, with justice that Scarfoglio said in explaining the
origin of anarchism, "A good fifth of the population of Italy are
still living in a savage state, dwelling in cabins that the Papuans
would not live in, accommodating themselves to a food which the
Shillooks would refuse, having a vision and an idea of the world not
much more ample than that of the Kaffirs, and running over the land
desiring and seeking servitude."
It may be added that it is because of this condition--that is, of the
defective civilization that results from it--that there is everywhere
a weakened revulsion and diminished horror at blood-crimes, so that
there are now sixty homicides for every one hundred thousand
inhabitants.
We may learn from this what the true remedies should be. The idea of
conquering anarchy by killing anarchists is not valid, because every
epileptic has another ready to take his place, because anarchistic
crimes are to a great extent simply indirect suicides, and because
anarchists think as little of their own lives as of the life of
another. It is rather necessary to change the direction of the disease
by changing the miserable conditions in which it originates.
Not for humanity, therefore, not for exalted social theories, but in
our direct interest, we ought to make a complete change. The
suppression of a dozen anarchists is like killing a thousand microbes
without disinfecting the surroundings that contain milliards of them;
it is that we should look, if we want to be better, to breaking up the
large estates, and ameliorating the conditions of agriculture and
operative industry, and this in the interest of the governing classes.
Typhus, cholera, and plague, it is true, attack chiefly the poor, but
from these the contagion extends also to the rich; and from the
unhealthy habitations in which the rich man permits beggars to crowd
and suffer, the miasm, as if in revenge, is propagated to marble
palaces.
That imbecile idea of some European nations, who, instead of
disinfecting the medium, find it better to put down the doctors who
propose remedies, can not make itself at home except among peoples who
are destined to perish.[S]--_Translated for the Popular Science
Monthly from the Archives di Psichiatria._
[Footnote S: To the charges made against me by M. Gautier (Le procès
Luccheni, 1899) of having formulated a diagnosis without seeing the
patient, which was therefore inexact, and of having described
characteristics of degeneration which did not exist, I answer with the
pages of Forel, certainly the most eminent alienist of our time, who
had him under his eyes during the whole process, and whose diagnosis
differs but little from mine.]
TENDENCIES IN FRENCH LITERATURE.[T]
SUGGESTED BY PROFESSOR DOWDEN'S RECENT BOOK.
BY PELHAM EDGAR, PH. D.
[Footnote T: A History of French Literature. By Edward Dowden, D.
Lit., LL. D., etc. New York: D. Appleton and Company. 1897.]