We have said that education is not sufficient to convert a criminal into an honest man. Conversely, trials and difficulties and the want of education are powerless to make a criminal of an honest individual. Hypnotism, the most powerful means of suggestion possible, cannot induce a good man to commit a crime during the hypnotic sleep, but vicious training has an enormous influence on weak natures, who are candidates for good or evil according to circumstances. Such individuals were classified by my father as _criminaloids_.
_Physical Characteristics._ Criminaloids have no special skeletal, anatomical, or functional peculiarities. As the criminaloid represents a milder type of the born criminal, he may possess the same physical defects in the skull, hair, beard, ears, eyes, teeth, lips, joints, hands, and feet, as well as all the sensory anomalies, lessened sensibility to touch and pain, hyper-sensibility to the magnet and barometrical variations, etc.; but all these anomalies are never found in the same proportion as in born criminals; that is, criminaloids never manifest the aggregate of physical and psychic peculiarities which distinguish born criminals and the morally insane. On the other hand, we find in criminaloids certain characteristics, such as premature greyness and baldness, etc., which are never exhibited by the born criminal. The real distinction between the criminaloid and the born criminal is psychological rather than physical.
_Psychological Characteristics._ The difference between born criminals and criminaloids becomes apparent directly on considering the age at which the latter enter on their anti-social career and the motives which cause them to adopt it. While the born criminal begins to perpetrate crimes from the very cradle, so to speak, and always for very trivial motives, the criminaloid commits his initial offence later in life and always for some adequate reason.
A criminal of this attenuated type, a certain Salvador, without cranial or facial anomalies, had led an honest life for many years, but on returning home after a prolonged absence on business, he found his house ransacked by his wife, who had deserted him. From that time he seems to have deliberately adopted a career of dishonesty, as the leader of a band of thieves.