I2ÓSection I.A. Marro.
of whom were aged, seeing his sister making fun of his lameness, after
having attempted an assault upon her, seized a club and crushed her head.
He boasted to me of the effect of his blow. Another assassin was also the
son of aged parents—an assassin who, in company with an accomplice,
drew a passer-by into a wood in order to kill and rob him; also a third,
who killed the father of a young girl whom he wished to violate.
The children of young parents are found in very small proportion
amongst the assassins and homicides. I only find 3% of these as children
of a young father.
The proportion of aged fathers is somewhat remarkable, namely 40%,
amongst those condemned for blows and injuries; but we find also amongst
them an increase in the number of the children of young parents; it is
greater than the proportion of the normal, and reaches 13.5%.
This is natural, because when it is a question of slight injuries or brawling,
the lack of affectivity may be as much the cause as the untamed character,
resenting offence with what seems to youth a natural promptitude, or from
alcoholic excitement, whilst with the assassin who meditates a blow and pushes
the re-action as far as to take his adversary’s life, the affective feelings must
always be profoundly altered.
One class of criminals in which the children of aged parents do not
predominate so clearly, is that of persons guilty of rape, of whom the pro
portion is from 30%. We have, nevertheless, in compensation, a greater
number of aged mothers.
Amongst the insane I have found that all the children born of fathers
either too young or too old show a large proportion as compared with
normal people and with criminals taken in general. The number which I
have observed (100) does not allow of the deduction of well-founded conclu
sions upon the relation of different forms of mental defect with the age of the
parents. I have found, however, that the forms of insanity most easily
curable, the pure melancholies and the manias, give relatively to the
normal a rather higher proportion of young fathers (15%), children of
middle-aged fathers rather less (59%), and an almost equal number of
children of aged fathers (25%). In the degenerative melancholic forms of
insanity the proportion of children of aged fathers attains the maximum;
two patients, the subjects of hypochondriac insanity, had been begotten by
men of whom one was 56 and the other 61, while the mothers were only
38 and 34.
In the other degenerative forms of insanity—paranoia, moral insanity,
hebephrenia, epilepsy—we have also a larger number of children of aged
fathers, 47%, whilst we find 37% of children of middle-aged fathers, and
17% of children of too young fathers. Moral insanity is distinguished
amongst all by the high proportion of children of aged fathers; 5 in 7
persons examined by me were found in this class, of whom 3 also had an
