A point, which I have already noticed in the section on Rape (see Chap. vu, pp. 352-357), is its association with certain fantastic and horrible acts, such as anthropophagy, or those of the Andreas Bichel case, first published by Feuerbach in his " Aktenmässige Darstellung merkwürdiger Verbrechen." After Bichel had raped his victim he performed what Lacassagne has well called dépeçage1 upon her. " I opened her breast with a knife," he remarks at his examination, "and cut through the fleshy parts of her body. Then I arranged the body as a butcher does beef, and hacked it with an axe into pieces of a size to fit the hole I had prepared for it. I may say that while opening the body I was so greedy that I trembled, and could have cut out a piece and eaten it."

3 I cut through).

Lacassagne, in his "Du Dépeçage Criminal," published in the Arch. deTAnthr. Crim., Paris, 1888, gives us a record of forty cases in which dismemberment of the body, subsequent to death, was resorted to for purposes of concealment. The advancement made in determining identity has enforced caution upon criminals. Thus, an assassin says that if he were called upon to kill anyone, he would first strike him senseless; then skin him as he would a calf, cut off his cars, put out his eyes, so that recognition by them would be impossible, and, cutting his body to pieces, scatter it here and there. The crime is, of course, rare, usually sexual, and few points are necessary for the physician to remember as aids to examination and identification of both victim and criminal, Note teeth, surface of body, length and color of hair, scars, tattooing, wounds of different weapons, indicating more than one operation; direction of cuts, showing right or left-handed person; manner of tying knots, or sewing, in parcelling the flesh, indicating a sailor or a woman; method of disarticulation, indicating cook, surgeon or medical student; bloody hands, rents in clothing, general disorder, location of crime, progress of putrefaction, especially rapid in those succumbing under intense fatigue; together with the flow, coagulation, and infiltration of blood. If there are traces of inflammation, or change of color in the ecchymoses, the wounds were made during life.

I have already mentioned Goltdammer's case of the man, Philippe; but not. I believe, under the heading lust-murder, the peculiar one recorded by Lombroso. "A certain Grassi was seized one night with sexual desire for a relative. Angered by her remonstrances, he stabbed her several times in the abdomen with a knife, and also stabbed her father and uncle, who attempted to hold him back. Iimnediately thereafter, he hastened to visit a prostitute, in order to coot his sexual passion in her arms. But this was not sufficient. He then murdered his father, and slaughtered several oxen in the stalls"1 The prominent feature in this case is that the element of murder, dominated that of lust.

One of Maschka's cases, that of the man Tirsch, is interesting as presenting in the crime the resultant of two not usually associated passions— lust and hatred. On account of the refusal of an offer of marriage, which he made to a widow, he developed an inordinate hatred of women, and wandered about, seeking an opportunity of killing one of the hated sex. Meeting a girl in a lonely wood, he assaulted, choked, and finally killed her. He then cut away the breasts and genitals, cooked and ate them, the horrible act being proven, not only by his own confession, but by the remains of the meal which were subsequently found.1

It is hard to conceive of a sexual passion so furious as to see nothing in death and agony to check or inhibit it; the presumption in such cases of mental disease is always strong; but when the bloody act is followed by such horrible sequels as that given above, the presumption becomes an absolute certainty, and the case is properly relegated to the category of criminal psychiatry.