The St. Johns herald., 1891-09-03
PredestlnatiOn and Crime.

enL names TOT lD6 SdIu6 liIlilSs nh'
 troubled the human mind ever since
 it became conscious of ideas, and
 promises to go on troubling it til
 the universe shall be rolled tOgeth-
 CT like a scroll and the earth disap-
 pear with fervent heat Every new
 generation takes new hold of il,
 presuming that nobodyever thought
 of it before, regards it on all sides,
 turns it upside down and inside out, and leaves 1t, if anything, more ob- scure than it found it, But whether the query poses itself in one way or another it is always the same old problem-that is to say, whether a man is responsible for his own acts, or whether somebody else or some thing else is not responsible for them. If he is not himself respon- sible, why should it not be his faith CT or mother, since they brought him into the world, without any ac- ton of will on his part, and should therefore be held to account for everything done by theIr offspring? If it is not lis father and mother why should it not be his environ ment, since no person acts without motive, and motives necessarily de- pend on external influence? If 1t is not his external environment 1t must be the body in which his nor. al nature is imprisoned which in- spires all his actions and for whose imperfections the man himself can not be held responsible, since it has been transmitted to him by his an cestOrs with all it's hereditary dis
 eases and defects. If this question with the subsidiary questions that grow out of it, would remain ab stract no great harm would be done :; but it tends constantly to become concrete and practical. If a man has committed d crime he naturally desires to prove that he was the victim of heredity. No sooner now adays has murderer been dispatch ed by one of the several recognized methods of execution than a host of me1ical experts swoop down up on his remains and proceed to lay bare all the secrets of his anatomy with the secret or avowed object of proving that he was not morally re- sponsible on account of physical defects. The latest assassin whose execution and the dissection of whose remains have attracted the attention of the scientists of Eu
 rope was Hugo Schenck, an Aus trian, who, after having married and murdered a multitude of women, from mere wantonness, was caught and obliged to pay the penalty of his numerous crimes. The trouble with Schenck was with his brain, as it appears from the report of the medical experts who dissected his body. The brain, 1t Is generally supposed. has more or less to do Nith every murder, but that of this Austrian Bluebeard impelled him so inevitably to this form of assas- sination that all resistance he might have opposed to the inclination would have been worse than useless. He seems to have been lacking in TO quality that goes to make up the perfect man except the moral sense, of which he had not a particle, and of which he could not be expected to have a particle owing to the pc
 culiarities of his brain. This organ, as it appears, weighed some twenty or thirty grains more than it should have weighed, and was crammed into skull the sutures of which had been prematurely closed, thus preventing free movement of the nervous pulp. As a consequence of this restricted space, there were here and there, atrophies, fiat places, ab- sorptions, indurations, interrup- tions of continuity, attachments of the pulp to the cranium, and nor