ABSTRACT
The writer, Thomas Plint, was interested in the relationship between crime and environmental circumstances and he gathered large quantities of statistical information in his investigation. He argued that detailed empirical knowledge of criminal class was necessary in order to base remedies upon such knowledge and it seems clear that Plint was influenced by the growing body of opinion which required more than the unproven evangelical or associationist assumptions about criminal man which had prevailed previously. In particular, Francis Galton was deeply involved in the pioneering of anthropometric measurement, seeking to show that cultural and other behaviour was linked to cerebral physiology and that cranial measurement might indicate evolutionary stage. There emerged in the 1870s and 1880s a much more influential positivistic psychology than phrenology itself, based upon a widely held view that criminal man was not only different from normal in terms of his head shape and more general physiological structure but represented an earlier more primitive organism.
