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DEEMING:

PREHISTORIC MAN

STORY OF A SKULL.

Recent removals of the remains of crimi-   nals executed in the Melbourne Gaol afforded an opportunity for a careful ex- amination of the skull of Frederick      

Bayley Deeming, the murderer, which was     made by the director of the Aus- tralian Institute of Anatomy (Professor Sir Colin Mackenzie), who was astonished   to find that in Deeming, by an extra- ordinary lapse of nature, a prehistoric man of the earliest primitive type known to   science had been born in the nineteenth century. The evidence of the remains proves that Deeming was little less than a dangerous animal.

In March, 1892, the body of a woman was   found under a hearthstone embedded in  

cement, in a house in Windsor. The crime   was traced to Deeming, who, under the       name of Barron Swanson, had fled to     Southern Cross (W.A.), where he was     arrested and whence he was brought back   to Melbourne. In the meantime inquiries instituted by "The Argus" through its Lon- don representative brought to light the fact that Deeming had also murdered his     wife and four children at Rainhill, near     Liverpool, in England. The bodies had     been disposed of in a manner similar to that of his victim at Windsor. These dis- closures, Deeming's callous and indifferent   behaviour after his arrest, and the bru- tality of the crimes aroused popular feel- ing deeply. The murdered woman proved to be Emily Mather with whom Deeming   had gone through the ceremony of mar- riage in England. He had become engaged     after the murder to a Miss Rounsevell, and at Southern Cross he had already provided    

the cement for the disposal of her body.  

The Trial.

Deeming's trial, which lasted for five     days, was begun before the late Mr. Jus- tice Hodges at the end of April, 1892. The evidence left no possible doubt of his guilt. The only possible hope of procur- ing a verdict in his favour lay in a plea of insanity, which was not upheld, despite     evidence by Dr. J. W. Springthorpe and the late Dr. J. Y. Fishbourne. Deeming was an extrardinary glib liar, and Dr. Springthorpe had the greatest difficulty in arriving at the truth. The vanity of the prisoner was immeasureable and he dis- played an utter lack of remorse for his         crimes. He pretended that when he changed  

his name he changed his identity. He ad-     mitted that Frederick Williams-the name             he had used at Rainhill-had killed the     women and children there, also that Frederick Deeming had killed       Emily Mather at Windsor, but neither of   these crimes, he insisted, could be alleged       against Barron Swanson, the name he had     assumed in Western Australia, and he vigor- ously dissociated himself from the acts of Williams and Deeming. Dr. Spring-     thorpe's summing-up of the life of Deem-       ing was that it had been "an extravaganza     broken by lack of funds at intervals."  

The Crown kept the medical witnesses     for the defence strictly to the terms of what is known as the McNaughton test, namely, whether at the time the crime was committed Deeming was   aware of the nature and quality of his   actions. This test was laid down by a   committee of the House of Lords in 1843, as determining guilt, and in 1891 it had been reaffirmed by the Victorian Full Court.                   Dr. Springthorpe could not conscien- tiously swear to the state of Deem-     ing's mind at the time he committed   the crime, in order to overcome the McNaughton test. His persistence in   maintaining his own conviction of insanity     brought him into conflict with the Court, and Mr. Justice Hodges somewhat abruptly terminated his evidence. The verdict of guilty was a foregone conclusion and Deeming was sentenced to death.    

The Scientific Viewpoint.

The examination of the remains by Sir        

Colin Mackenzie revealed some very interesting features. When man first as-   sumed the upright posture his head was   placed on the spinal column toward the       back of the skull, where also was the open-   ing known as the foramen magnum, through which the spinal cord reached the brain.     In order to keep the head from sagging     forward a broad band of muscle was at-       tached to the back of the skull, where it   was anchored to a bony ridge. When   the upright posture of man became firmly established the spinal column and the   foramen magnum moved forward to the     centre of the base of the skull, where the   head became balanced, and, their usefulness     being passed, the heavy muscles and the bony ridge disappeared. These changes took place slowly over thousands of years.     Even in the now extinct palæolithic Tas-       manian native the foramen magnum was         in the centre of the base as in modern man, and there was no trace of the bony     ridge at the back of the skull. It was   therefore with no little astonishment that       Sir Colin Mackenzie discovered that in   Deeming's skull the opening for the spinal       cord was at the back of the base as in   the anthropoid. The bony ridge at the back was also clearly in evidence.    

This, however was not all. Behind each     ear there is a small bony projection on the skull known as the mastoid process.   In modern man these point directly down-       ward and slightly forward. In the most       primitive type of man they sloped back- ward. In Deeming's skull the mastoid   processes curve backward. The arch of the   skull is also distinctly simian. A cast of the   oldest human relic known to science, the   Java skull, when placed upon Deeming's   fits it like a cap. Deeming had also the         characteristic anthropoid heavy bony struc- ture of the brows. The cubic content of   the skull is also very low, and there is no frontal development, showing that the         brain was of a very low and primitive type. The skeleton of Deeming also re-     vealed two very distinct and typical anthro-             poid characteristics. The angle at which   the thigh bones were set in the hip sockets   gave him the shambling ape-like gait that       was so noticeable in him, and he also had     immensely long arms which reached to his   knees. The deductions to be drawn from   these extraordinary peculiarities are that Deeming was a dreadful anachronism. He       was born thousands of years too late for   the biological era to which he belonged,     and compared with modern man he was     but one step in development from the an-   thropoid, with a moral and intellectual   capacity to match.  

Like Sir Colin Mackenzie, Dr. Spring-  

thorpe, who has also examined the cast made from the skull, is astonished. Deeming must have been totally incapable of ap-

preciating any moral precept. His mind was governed only by his material needs.      

Whatever he required he acquired by the most direct means. If killing were the   easiest method of attainment, he killed. His   knowledge of right or wrong was similar to           that of a cat or a dog, which has no moral     sense, but which realises wrong-doing be-   cause of former punishment. Just as an   animal detected in theft will use cunning   to evade punishment, so Deeming used his higher order of animal cunning. He was   not capable of remorse for his crimes, and that factor accounts for his callousness.  

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