# Popular Science Monthly/Volume 52/April 1898/Criminal Anthropology in Italy

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* CRIMINAL ANTHROPOLOGY IN ITALY.
By HELEN ZIMMERN.
"Enemy" ye shall say, but not "wicked one"; "diseased one" ye shall say, but not "wretch"; "fool" ye shall say, but not "sinner."—F. Nietzsche.
IF we were asked to name in what particular Italy stands to-day quite head and shoulders above her fellows, we should unhesitatingly say in the science of criminal anthropology. This is an essentially Italian study, whose origin we discover as early as 1320, when the King of the Two Sicilies decreed that no one should be permitted to practice medicine who had not studied anatomy for at least one year. After this, in the fourteenth century, we find men who devoted themselves to the study of skulls, thus laying the basis of the science of craniology. It was Italians, therefore, who initiated this science, and to Italy has been reserved the proud place of bringing it to its high development in the nineteenth century, even though the discoveries of Darwin, which gave it a fresh impetus, date from England. Beyond question the peninsula is at the head and front of all studies connected with criminal anthropology, and not of criminal anthropology only, but of all cognate sciences connected with crime and the criminal.
To the Italians belongs the merit of reviving the study of a question with which philosophy, law, and medicine have always been occupied. It has been well remarked that whenever philosophical studies have free expansion, that whenever the desire to safeguard society, the spirit of toleration, the methods of ameliorating the fate of the guilty, have been studied by thinkers, their conceptions have eventually conquered public opinion. It is to the glory of Italy, the land where Roman law, the foundation of modern law, was born, that it has again put into the crucible this problem of criminality, and that it has proceeded to the study of this problem by the only truly scientific method—namely, that of studying the psychology of criminals and their pathological abnormities. It will be its distinction to have declared against illusory enthusiasms, and to have founded a science which will contribute to the more efficacious protection of society. The recognized chief of this Italian school is Prof. Cesare Lombroso, of Turin, who has illustrated his theories by a number of remarkably able and interesting books. Until quite recently, to the world at large, the criminal figured as of the Bill Sykes type—and who, reading Oliver Twist, has not shrunk with horror on perusing the intimate drama of the ruffian's mind after the brutal murder of the faithful Nancy? These things move us as the highest efforts of Dickens's imagination. Bill Sykes was written in prescientific days. ​It is instructive to turn from him, and the class of melodramatic ruffians of whom he is but an example, to the criminals dispassionately laid bare in mental, moral, and physical dissection by Lombroso and his fellow-workers. Certainly no such type as Bill Sykes, a projected image of the novelist's brains, coinciding with a highly strung nervous system, is to be found in the gallery of habitual malefactors presented to us in the Uomo Delinquente and other books. Habitual malefactors, according to Italian students, are a class apart from other men, a distinct species of "genus Homo sapiens," must be judged by special standards, and must by no means be informed with the feelings of normal men. Herein consists the fundamental basis of the new science of criminal anthropology—a science which bids fair, in spite of conservative and clerical opposition and even of ignorant ridicule, to modify profoundly our present manner of considering and treating these enemies and pests of society.
"Criminal anthropology," says Signor Sergi, one of the ablest exponents of the new system, "studies the delinquent in his natural place—that is to say, in the field of biology and pathology. But it does not for that reason put him outside the society in which his criminal manifestations occur, for it considers human society as a natural biological fact, outside of which man does not and can not live. As normal anthropology, like other biological sciences, studies and observes the individual in his natural milieu, and finds that this milieu is double, physical and organic, and under this double aspect sees him develop and act, so criminal anthropology does the same with the very limited and specialized aim of discovering the nature and origin of the phenomenon of crime. Every phenomenon, however, remains inexplicable if it be examined alone; the explanation is easier if it be studied in the complex of phenomena developed in the double physical and social milieu of which we have spoken."
Words such as these, where we find embryology, physiology, anatomy, chemistry, and statistics, invoked as aids to the origin of crime, place us at the antipodes of ancient philosophies; yet Lombroso and his school are in reality acting on the old-world notion embodied by Horace in his "mens sana in corpore sano." The delinquent, they argue, acts abnormally. Acts being the visible results of functions performed by the brain and reflective nervous system, it follows that these functions are abnormal. The functions being abnormal, the organs which perform them must be either abnormal or troubled in their action by the habitual or accidental interference of disturbing causes, for no normal organ acting under normal conditions can perform abnormal functions. The founders of this new school, therefore, dedicate themselves first of all to the study of the skull, brain, and nervous system of the criminals; then ​make careful observations not only on other parts of the skeleton but on the living body; the height, length, and proportion of the members, the total or partial development of each part; the weight of the body, its muscular development, the deeper-seated organs, such as the heart, liver, kidneys, intestines; the various functions which may directly or indirectly affect those of the brain, such as the circulation of the blood, digestion, and the disturbances which show themselves there, and in consequence of the general state of the organism as regards the balance of the vital functions; sleep, sexual manifestations, normal or abnormal muscular force, and other factors besides. Everything, indeed, which concerns the morphology of the criminal is passed through the sieve of the severest scrutiny. This scrutiny reveals, as might be expected, various irregularities. The skull, for instance, presents anomalies of shape and size, being in a large percentage of cases abnormally small; anomalies indicative of regression and of arrested development; anomalies in the position, shape, and closing of the sutures, "the doorways of the head" being invariably closed too early. Morphological irregularities are also found in the bones of the face, notably in those of the nose and lower jaw. The brain itself, say the investigators, shows unmistakable signs of a degraded form, in the number and distribution of the cerebral convolutions, in the entire atrophy of some parts, in the extraordinary development of others. The shape and structure of the skull and brain, says Lombroso, connect criminals very closely with primitive man, and even with his animal ancestors. Criminals must be regarded either as forms belated in the race of development, or as physical and therefore also moral degradations—unavoidable, regrettable products of our civilization. In either case they form a distinct species, in need of scientific investigation.
The action of the brain is, however, not only modified by its form and development, but also, in a very large number of cases, by pathological occurrences. Traces of old wounds, "some head-blow not heeded in his youth," said Sir Kay of King Arthur's self—hæmorrhages, affections of the investing membrane and of the blood-vessels are seldom wanting. In other words, the organ that controls and originates actions is in a morbid state. Further, the slight irregularities constantly verified in the branchings of the blood-vessels in the heart, liver, and other viscera can not but conspire, by the abnormal functionings they occasion, toward the production of physiologically irregular organisms.
Intimately connected with the physical conditions of the criminal are his psychic peculiarities. These consist chiefly in great instability of character, coupled with overwhelming development of some passion and the atrophy of some others. The criminal acts from ​impulse, although he often displays, as madmen do, a low cunning in finding means to carry out his impulse. He is intensely vain, priding himself on the number of crimes he has committed. He is further devoid of all remorse, fond of boasting of his evil deeds and of describing them in detail. Thus Lombroso gives the reproduction of a photograph, in which three murderers who had assassinated one of their number caused themselves to be represented in the very act of committing their deadly deed, a photograph taken for the benefit of their less fortunate associates.
This inordinate vanity is often in itself the primary cause of terrible crimes, especially in young men who have just attained puberty, an age observed to be especially fruitful in crimes of violence. The critical character of this period, even in well-balanced minds, is abundantly known; little wonder, then, if it prove fatal to those whose constitutions urge them to extremes. It is noticed also that the criminal needs to lead a life full of noise. The necessity of orgies entailed by the irregularities of his feelings is often the moving cause of some act of violence, such as robbery and assassination, calculated to procure the means of indulgence. His affections, too, are abnormal: he will assassinate father and mother, and yet be capable of making sacrifices for some companion in time of illness. This trait, however, occurs more often among women than men. We used to believe there was a species of honor among thieves, but Lombroso asserts that it is rare to find any consistent attempt to shield each other; on the contrary, the almost physical need they feel of talking incessantly renders them specially inclined to mutual betrayal. The criminal is fond of tattooing himself, and so distinctive a mark of criminal tendencies is this held in Italy that tattooed recruits are looked on as likely to make bad soldiers; and a private once spoke to Lombroso of tattooing as "convict habits." He presents, too, an extraordinary insensibility to pain, tattooing himself in places which even the Indians spare, and receiving or inflicting on himself the most terrible wounds without a murmur.
He has a language of his own, employed even in cases where he would run no risk from using ordinary speech, and this still further isolates him from the rest of.mankind. He has a writing of his own, too, made up of hieroglyphics and rough pictures.
Such briefly is the Frankenstein, which the modern science of criminal anthropology evokes; an unbalanced being, a pathological subject, whose illness takes a form which, hurtful to society, is defined as crime. For the facts collected by Lombroso place beyond all doubt the intimate connection between crime and mental derangements which has so long been suspected to exist. Madmen and criminals belong to the same family; not in the sense of the vulgar ​and unthinking expression that all criminals are mad, though everyday experience in the police courts puts it beyond doubt that many are actually deranged, but in the sense that both classes are in a similar pathological state, which manifests itself on the one hand in lunacy, on the other in crime. This position is rendered still stronger by the revelations of genealogical statistics, which reveal the heredity through long generations of criminal tendencies, as they do of insanity, and alternations of criminals and madmen, in the same or successive generations.
Lombroso divides criminals into two great classes, the original or born delinquent, and the fortuitous offender, a man who becomes criminal through outward influences.
The first, the synthesis of every degeneration, the outcome of all biological deterioration, commits crimes against society by virtue of a morbid process passing from one generation to another, derived from cerebral and other physiological conditions. In him the impulse of passion is not sullen or isolated, but associates itself almost always with reflection. The second, on the contrary, the criminal of passion and impetus, acts at a given moment in consequence of an overwhelming stimulus, say a sudden access of jealousy. The two classes frequently merge into each other, for the mere fact that a man, suddenly, without reflection, by a reflex act, as it were, stabs his offender or his unfaithful wife, proves that he is not normal. The want of reflection constitutes an extenuating circumstance before judge or jury, but before pathological psychology, says Signor Sergi, "it constitutes an accusation."
The importance of the distinction is seen in the views taken on criminal jurisprudence by Lombroso and his school. It is generally said that to act logically in face of these views we should have to make extensive use of capital punishment. The most hasty perusal of Lombroso's books will show that this is not his view of the case. He lays immense stress on prevention, for even the morbid process may, he asserts, be modified in the very young, just as a disease, taken in time, may be cured, but, neglected, becomes chronic.
He examines carefully the means adopted in various countries for refining the minds of children, and speaks warmly of English ragged schools. Juvenile refinement, strict but judicious control, education in the highest sense of the word—these must be, he argues, the primary object of every nation which aims at decreasing its criminality. He also advocates an association between various nations for the hunting of criminals, and for making such observations on their lives and habits as shall lead to their easier classification. In reformatories he has small belief; statistics show that they in no way decrease the percentage of recidivists; the fact of recidivism shows ​the habitual criminal, and here no punishment will suffice. The man must be treated as though afflicted with a serious illness and removed from society, for which, however, he may and should be made to work. He insists that these questions are of vital importance to every nation, and asserts repeatedly Enrico Ferri. that teachers in ragged schools and founders of polytechnics are patriots and philanthropists in the highest sense of the words, because helping to stamp out crime more than all the long-term sentences in the world. Crime is at once a biological and a social phenomenon. The criminal is a microbe which only flourishes on suitable soil. Without doubt it is the environment which makes the criminal, but, like the cultivation medium, without the microbe it is powerless to germinate the crime. To use Professor Ferri's expression, up to recent times the criminal has been regarded as a sort of algebraic formula; the punishment has been proportioned not to the criminal but to the crime. Anthropologists are teaching us to strive after scientific justice. Time and events have brought into clear relief the inadequacy of legal maxims, founded on antiquated and unscientific conceptions, and thus modern Italians show us that not the nature of the crime but the dangerousness of the offender constitutes the only reasonable legal criterion to guide the inevitable social reaction against the criminal. This position is the legitimate outcome of the scientific study of the criminal. And where the man of science has led the way the man of law must follow.
Such, in brief and somewhat in the rough, are the conclusions of Italian criminal anthropology, which we have given at some length, as the subject is too vast as well as too new to be clearly comprehensible in a few words. In the autumn of 1896 an International Congress of Criminal Anthropologists was held at Geneva, and on this occasion the Italian school triumphed as never before over all adversaries and schismatics, and especially over their French ​colleagues, who have carried their antagonism to Italy and things Italian even to the serene fields of science. The French objections were beaten down by a very hailstorm of facts, so carefully collated, so industriously collected, that opposition was perforce silenced. In the front ranks of the combatants, indeed, leading the attack, was that eminent criminal sociologist, Enrico Ferri, whose legal vocations have not hindered him from continuing his favorite studies, though he is no less valiant as a lawyer than as a scientist. Indeed, he holds that the two studies ought to go hand in hand. All lawyers, he affirms, should dedicate themselves to the study of criminal anthropology if they would go to the fountain-head of human responsibility; all judges should be inspired by this doctrine, ere blindly punishing a culprit on the faith of a code not always founded on direct observation of the environment or of the individual. "It is not true that with Lombroso's Cesare Lombroso. theories all prison doors would be broken down and respectable humanity given over to the mercy of delinquents, as our opponents say. And were the first part of this strange paradox to be verified—i. e., that which demands that in order to be logical all prison doors be opened—there would open also those of the lunatic asylums in order to permit the entry of the men ejected from the prisons, individuals whose mental and physical constitutions pushed them into crime." It was just this theory of the born criminal, which Lombroso was the first irrefutably to prove, and whose effects must shortly be felt in criminal legislation, that carried off the most clamorous victory at Geneva.
Cesare Lombroso, who is a Hebrew by birth, was born at Turin, in 1836. As a mere lad he loved to write, and composed, with the same facility and rapidity that distinguishes him to this day, novels, poems, tragedies, treatises on archæological, physiological, and already on sociological subjects, those dating from his student days being actually published, so much talent did they show. Medicine ​was the study to which he devoted himself, and his first independent researches were directed to examining into the causes that produce the idiotism and the pellagra that exist, unfortunately, so largely in Lombardy and Liguria. His treatise on this theme attracted the attention of no less a person than Professor Virchow. After fighting for the independence of Italy in 1859, he was appointed professor of psychiatry at Pavia, where he founded a pyschiatric museum. From Pavia he passed to Pesaro, as director of the Government madhouse, and thence to Turin as professor of forensic medicine, a position he still retains. It was in his native Turin that he began those original studies destined to make his name famous over all the globe. Endowed by nature with a strong intelligence, a robust will. and a keen intellectual curiosity, he was indifferent to the incredulous smile, the sarcasms, that greeted his first efforts at solving problems hitherto held insoluble. Very bitter, very hard were his struggles—how hard only those can appreciate who have talked with Lombroso in intimacy and have noted the pained scorn with which he speaks of his adversaries—adversaries some of whom are not silenced to this hour. But his science, his studies conquered, which if not always complete yet are always serious, wherefore criminal anthropology, a mere infant some thirty years ago, may to-day be said to be adult; a raw empiric but a while ago, to-day a science, young if you will, but vital and destined to overturn the facile, fantastic monuments erected by so many penalists. The work with which Lombroso will go down to posterity is a huge book, huge in every sense of the word, in which criminal man is studied on a scientific basis. We refer to the Uomo Delinquente, of which its author has published most recently a new, revised, and enlarged edition, wrestling with new facts, new observations, and new deductions. This edition is limited to one hundred copies, perhaps to allow its prolific author soon to issue another, enriched with yet more facts, yet more acute deductions.
It is dedicated to Max Nordau, the author of that noted book. Degeneration, who had in his turn dedicated his work to his master, Cesare Lombroso. The dedication reads thus: "To you I have wished to dedicate this volume with which I close my studies on human degeneration, as to the most sincere friend I have found in the sad course of my scientific life, and as to the one who has wrested fecund fruits from the new doctrines I have attempted to introduce into the scientific world." Needless to say that Lombroso is the very first person to admit that in the almost virgin field of criminal anthropology there is still much to do, and that Science has not yet spoken her last word; but it is his magic wand that has indicated the horizon and has swept over vast new areas, often with ​lightning rapidity and intuition. Thus the base of the new edifice was laid, and the rest of the new monument rose up rapidly around it, notwithstanding its occasional faultiness, pointed out eagerly by adverse scientists, criticisms that could not shake down the edifice, for its base was too solid and strong. Gradually a few apostles of the new science gathered around Lombroso, and although Morselli, one of the most acute and cultured observers, after a time severed himself from the group and joined the French schismatics, nevertheless the little compact mass moved from success to success, from triumph to triumph, up to the late ultimate triumph at Geneva.
Another of Lombroso's books which aroused much discussion and which may almost be said to have founded yet another school, if we may so designate the group devoted to the study of another branch of anthropology, was Genio o Follia, which largely helped to make its author's name known even outside of srictly scientific circles. This work enchanted all thinkers, psychiatrists, doctors, indeed, all men who dedicate themselves to the search for signs of madness in the lives and works of eminent authors and artists. For Lombroso had striven in this book to prove scientifically how closely genius and madness are allied. As was the case with Criminal Man, so here too the master's disciples strayed from the paths laid down by the pioneer, exaggerated his conclusions and carried them to absurd excesses. Lombroso had at last to raise his voice against the extravagances into which he was dragged. Besides various absurdities, there were published some careful serious studies having for their themes the lives of Napoleon I, Leopardi, Ugo Foscolo, and Byron, in which it was made to appear that these men were all victims of heredity, and neither their virtues nor their vices were their own—studies of interest, academically considered, but of no tangible utility, and which did not add or detract one iota from the merits or demerits of their subjects. Against this method of dealing with men of genius as pathological subjects Mantegazza recently very rightly upraised his voice in the name of art, tradition, and history.
Space does not permit of our naming Lombroso's varied and voluminous writings, whose enumeration any biographical dictionary can supply. La Donna Delinquente (The Criminal Woman), written in collaboration with G. Ferrero, one of the most promising of the younger criminal anthropologists, of which an incomplete and inadequate translation appeared in England, aroused a storm of discussion on its publication four years ago, and was especially attacked by the adherents of the old methods. He has since published The Anarchists, in which he also takes unusual views with regard to these latter-day society pests—pests for whom society itself, as nowadays conditioned, he holds as alone responsible—and Crime ​as a Society Function, which has aroused the fury of the clerical and moderate factions in Italy. Chips from the workshop of his extraordinarily prolific brain, ever evolving new ideas, new points of view, he scatters in the many articles he loves to write for English and American periodicals; but his most important scientific communications he reserves for the Archivio di Psichiatria, which he edits together with Ferri and Garofolo. His work is by no means perfect: he is apt to jump too rapidly at conclusions, to accept data too lightly; thus he was led at the beginning to overestimate the atavistic element in the criminal, and at a later date he has pressed too strongly the epileptic affinities of crime. Still, when all is said and done, his work is undoubtedly epoch-making, and has opened up valuable new lines of investigation and suggested others.
We said that Lombroso's first studies were directed to the pellagra, that strange and terrible disease which annually mows down such a vast number of victims in the fair land of northern Italy, and which is a luminous proof Enrico Morselli. of the grave financial condition of the laborers in some of the most beautiful and richest regions of the world. Concerning this terrible illness, which densely populates Italian madhouses, all students of natural science have long been gravely occupied. For the terrible increase in lunacy noted by Italian statistics in the last five years the pellagra is largely responsible. Psychiatry, which has abandoned the old methods in Italy, is no longer a jailer employing the methods of an inquisitor, but a science that seeks for ultimate causes and remedies, and, conjoined to economic and political science, endeavors to restore to society a large contingent of forces which would otherwise be destroyed by disease. Especially active in this department is Enrico Morselli, at present director of the hospital attached to the Genoa University. Morselli is in the flower of his life, and much may be still hoped from him. Like Lombroso, he is small of stature and ​square built; like Lombroso, lie has piercing eyes that shine forth acutely from behind glasses that he always wears. Psychologist, anthropologist, psychiatrist, philosopher, and literary man, Morselli has right to all these titles, and in each branch he is noteworthy. He was born in Modena in 1832, and studied at his native university, carrying off high honors. As a mere student he attracted attention by disputing the conclusions of a noted celebrity on some anthropological points, proving himself right. For a while he was the assistant of Mantegazza in arranging his Anthropological Museum, one of the finest as well as one of the most important in Europe. When only twenty-eight he was called to preside over the Turin lunatic asylum, and soon distinguished himself by his profound knowledge of everything connected with the study and treatment of the demented. Besides attending to his profession he found time to write a number of works dealing with normal and abnormal mental maladies, whose mere enumeration would fill pages, some of which, like his work on Suicide, have been translated into English. Morselli's latest work was a reply to Brunetière's assertions regarding "the bankruptcy of science," demonstrating that here was a case in which the wish was father to the thought, and for which no real foundation existed.
Paolo Mantegazza has been dealt with at length in these pages, and we need not go over the ground again. What is needful to say is, however, that he has been left behind in the rapid onward tramp of his younger colleagues. Mantegazza is perhaps entitled to lay claim to the name he loves to sport, that of the father of Italian anthropology; but, according to the more precise views of our day, he can hardly be regarded as a real scientist. As is often the case, the sons have outstripped the father, who now combats the views of his legitimate offspring. A reproach cast at Mantegazza, it would seem not without reason, is that he too closely follows Moliere's precept, "Je yrends mon bien où je le trouve" and that he has passed off as his own the conclusions and the work of German scientific men. Another reproach that is certainly well founded is his manifest delight in handling obscene themes, and handling them not in the calm, scientific spirit that removes from them a real obscene character, but treating the details with a gusto that reveals how these prurient matters rather delight than disgust him, and what is worse, these works are written in popular language, frankly appealing to a popular rather than a scientific audience. To this class belong all his works on Love, on Women, on the Art of taking a Wife, of Being a Husband, etc. It may safely be asserted that his fame is steadily declining, and that his want of perseverance and observation is itself to blame for this. By nature Mantegazza was endowed with a fine ​and versatile intelligence, but he has lowered it in the search after cash and easy success. This handsome old man, with the face and smile of a satyr, is a familiar figure on the streets of Florence.
The number of men who are strict anthropologists without being sociologists is extraordinarily great in contemporary Italy, and there is none of them who has not done good and original work. Limits of space oblige us perforce to pass them by, in order to speak of yet others of the new school created by Lombroso's theories, and who take rank in the files of criminal anthropology, a science far more interesting to the general reader than that which deals with biology pure and simple. To this section in the first rank belong the alienists, besides a large number of lawyers, judges, and journalists. The highest position among them belongs indubitably to Enrico Ferri. His verdict, like that of Cesare Lombroso, is constantly appealed to in complicated criminal cases where the sanity or the natural proclivity to crime of the person is in question. A man of really unusual physical beauty is Enrico Ferri, as well as of charm of manner and of eloquence which, when stirred to a theme dear to his heart, carries all before it. Enrico Ferri was born in 1856, in the neighborhood of Mantua, a city whose very name in Austrian days was synonymous with cruel despotism, for this and Spielburg were the favorite fortresses of the German persecutors. At a tender age he lost his father, and his mother, left in straitened circumstances, had a hard struggle to give her only child an adequate education. Already at the university Ferri distinguished himself, publishing a thesis which dealt with criminal law. When Lombroso published his great work on Criminal Man, Ferri was at once attracted by its scientific nature and sought to become acquainted with its author. Since then they have been fast friends as well as co-workers. In 1881 he was called to fill the chair of penal law at the University of Bologna. His opening discourse dealt with the theme which was to prove the first draft of his great work, Criminal Sociology, a work which has been translated into many European tongues. The lecture was entitled New Horizons in Penal Law. He says: "It was in this inaugural discourse that I affirmed the existence of the positivist school of criminal law, and assigned to it these two fundamental rules: 1. While the classical schools of criminal law have always studied the crime and neglected the criminal, the object of the positivist school was, in the first place, to study the criminal, so that, instead of the crime being regarded merely as a juridical fact, it must be studied with the aid of biology, of psychology, and of criminal statistics as a natural and social fact, transforming the old criminal law into a criminal sociology. 2. While the classical schools, since Beccaria and ​Howard, have fulfilled the historic mission of decreasing the punishments, as the reaction from the severity of the mediæval laws, the object of the positivist school is to decrease the offenses by investigating their natural and social causes in order to apply social remedies more efficacious and more humane than the penal counteraction, always slow in its effects, especially in its cellular system, which I have called one of the aberrations of the nineteenth century."
Ferri has occupied himself less with the instinctive than with the occasional criminal, and his clear and philosophic spirit has placed him at the head of criminal sociologists. Elected to Parliament even before the age of thirty, previous to which he could not take his place, according to Italian law, he began an avowed liberal, but soon passed over to the ranks of scientific socialists, whose acknowledged leader he has since become. He also holds the post of professor of penal law at the Roman University. But his home is on the vine-and olive-clad shores of Etruscan Fiesole, within a short walk of Florence. Of his great work on Homicide we have treated at length in these pages. Though in some points he has grown to differ from him, Ferri continues to venerate his master Lombroso, and with rare eloquence defends his theories from attacks at moments when the less eloquent scientist seems silenced by the arguments of his adversaries. It was due to his energy, conjoined to the initiative of Lombroso, that the first International Congress of Criminal Anthropologists was held in Rome in 1885, which constituted the installation of international criminal anthropology in sight of the European public. The second was held at Paris in 1889. It was there that the scientific misunderstanding arose, which was still more openly affirmed at the third congress held at Brussels in 1892, but was finally and conclusively beaten down at Geneva at the fourth congress in 1896; a result in a large measure due to Ferri's fascinating, all-persuading eloquence. In a letter written to me he has stated the whole matter so clearly that I can not do better than reproduce the same: "As you know, the positive school of criminal studies was consolidated in Italy by the contemporaneous publication in 1878 of the second volume of the Uomo Delinquente, of my volume on the Imputableness and Negation of Free Will, and of the pamphlet of Garofolo on the Positive Criterion of Penalty. In these first affirmations there naturally preponderated the conclusions of Lombroso, which gave and left on the public the impression that the new school only studied the criminal from his organic side as a biological monstrosity. Yet, in 1880, I had published my studies on Criminals in France from 1826 to 1878, in which I expounded the natural factors of the three orders ​of crime—anthropological, physical, and social—laying stress on the social causes that conduce to crime. As a reaction from the aforenamed impression in Italy, Turati, Colajanni, and Battaglia published in 1882 to 1884 pamphlets and volumes maintaining that crime is an exclusively social phenomenon. I replied to Turati—Crime and the Social Question—with the volumes on Socialism and Criminality (1883), now out of print, where I combated: 1. Artistic and romantic socialism while recognizing the fundamental truths of scientific socialism. 2. The unilateral theory that crime is the product only of social factors, and that, therefore, with time it must certainly disappear. Continuing to maintain these two propositions, even after my avowed adhesion to scientific socialism, it has come about that in Italy this unilateral thesis has gradually become abandoned even by socialists. On the other hand, this thesis was taken up again in 1885 at the congress in Rome, and above all in 1889 at Paris, and in 1892 at Brussels by the French anthropological criminal socialists—Lacassagne, Tarde, Topinard, Corée, etc.—who succeeded in spreading the belief that there exists a French criminal anthropological school founded on the theory that the criminal is an exclusively social phenomenon—a thesis that had, for the matter of that, already been sustained in Italy by the socialists. It is thus that was circulated among the international public, who can not read Italian publications unless they are translated, the impression that opposing the Italian school there was a French school; the former maintaining the exclusively biological origin of the criminal, while the latter regarded his genesis as exclusively social. The congress at Geneva has cleared up this misunderstanding, which has lasted too long. Crime is a phenomenon whose origin is both biological and social. This is the final conclusion which the Italian school has proclaimed since the beginning of its existence."
It is noteworthy and also significant that almost all thoughtful Italians who have dedicated themselves to the studies of anthropology in general and criminal anthropology in particular are socialists in politics. Assiduous, dispassionate observation of mankind would seem to have brought them to this conclusion. A leader in the Italian Parliament in this sense, as well as a gifted criminal anthropologist, is Napoleone Colajanni, by original profession a doctor, but now too absorbed in his political duties to practice. Colajanni is by birth a Sicilian, and has much of the quick, fiery temperament of these islanders, in whose veins the blood courses hotly. A facile orator, his speeches always command attention in Parliament, while his rigid, incorruptible honesty makes him esteemed in a milieu of unscrupulous politicians and wire-pullers. As philanthropist, as politician, he was ​early attracted to study the problems of misery and crime, whence resulted his great work on Criminal Sociology. Like Ferri and all the other thoughtful students of the criminal, he has seen the direct bearing on criminality of what he himself well calls "social hygiene." He points out how we may neglect the problems of social organization, but must do so at our peril. In many respects he is opposed to Lombroso. He holds, for example, that Lombroso has too much accentuated the atavistic element in the criminal He agrees with those who deem that of a great number of modern habitual criminals it may be said that they have the misfortune to live in an age when their merits are not appreciated. Had they lived in the world a sufficient number of generations ago, the strongest of them might have been chiefs of a tribe. As Callahan has said: "How many of Homer's heroes would to-day be in convict prisons or at all events despised as unjust and violent!" He has strenuously combated Lombroso's indiscriminate method of collecting facts, and compares it to Charles IX's famous order on St. Bartholomew's Eve: "Kill them all! God will know his own."
And now it is time we should speak of Garofolo, the Neapolitan lawyer who, accepting generally the conclusions reached by Lombroso and Ferri, has become the most distinguished jurist of the moment, the pioneer of the reform R. Garofolo. of law through the method of natural science. His Criminology is marked by luminous suggestions of wise reform. Like Morselli, Garofolo does not blindly follow where his compeers lead. His latest volume, entitled Socialistic Superstitions, has excited much wrath and astonishment in socialistic and anthropological camps, and was severely combated, especially by Ferri, who wrote a pamphlet on purpose to confute the publication. K. Garofolo was born in Naples, in 1852, of an old patrician family, hence perhaps by atavism he is debarred from being a socialist. He holds the position of professor of law and penal procedure in his native city, and was intrusted by the Government in 1892 to draw up a scheme for the revision of the penal code. Garofolo has occupied himself chiefly, ​nay, entirely with the legal side of criminal anthropology, and his great work Criminology deals with the means of repressing crime quite as much as with its nature and causes. He has also studied the question of what reparation is due to victims of crime. His only flight into sociology has concerned his attack on socialism, in whose curative Utopia he does not believe.
Among the latest contributors to this fascinating science the highest places belong to three young men: Scipio Sighele, Guglielmo Ferrero, and A. G. Bianchi. All three are journalists, all three distinguished by the same qualities of keen observation, of more than ordinary cultivation, with sometimes a tendency to write a little hastily and to jump to conclusions too rapidly. This reproof especially concerns Sighele, who has allowed himself to judge and write of matters English and American of which he has but the most superficial and second-hand knowledge. Here the newspaper writer has done wrong to the scientist. Sighele made his name with an admirable book entitled The Criminal Crowd, which a French writer has thought fit to appropriate in outline and almost entirely in substance, obtaining for it Scipio Sighele. the honor of translation into English, while the real author has been left out in the cold. Able, too, is The Criminal Couple. A paradoxical pamphlet directed against parliamentary government, and revealing the failure of a system on which the hopes of Europe were once based as the sheet-anchor of liberty, excited some attention on its appearance in 1895, and was dealt with at length in Blackwood's Magazine. His last work, on Individual Morality as opposed to Public Morality, inspired by the doubtful morality of Signor Crispi's government, also aroused discussion, especially among Crispi's adherents, who looked on the book as a bit of special pleading in favor of their master's dubious political proceedings.
Guglielmo Ferrero is a Piedmontese, and belongs to an old ​aristocratic family of Turin. Although his name is already well known in scientific circles, he is still little more than a youth. Together with Lombroso he wrote the Criminal Woman, spoken of at length in these pages, and which Guglielmo Ferrero. at once brought him to the front, as all the world knew that it was he who collated and collected the facts therein contained. His first independent work was that most remarkable one dealing with Symbols, of which we have also spoken before. His latest publication deals with Crispi, whose personality he subjected to a scientific analysis qualifying him as a born madman. Ferrero, too, is a convinced socialist, and on this account was arrested during the reign of terror that prevailed in the course of the last months of Crispi's dictatorship. He was ordered to leave Italy, and, profiting by this enforced exile, he visited Germany and learned the language and the condition of anthropological studies in that land. He has but recently returned. His magazine articles are always able, and marked by a high and independent tone.
A. G. Bianchi, a Milanese by birth, is also young. Not rich, like Ferrero, he had to make his own way, and entered into journalism as a means to obtain daily bread. He began life as a railway official, writing at the same time reviews of new books, Italian and foreign. Together with a colleague he founded a paper called La Cronica Rossa, and it was in these pages that he began to occupy himself with scientific literature, and to prove himself an enthusiastic follower of Lombroso. He entered the best Italian newspaper, Corriere della Sera, as its legal editor, and thus became even more enamored of criminal anthropology. Intelligent, industrious, studious, he dedicated himself to the new science with ardor, and in a short time became allied to Lombroso and Morselli, who both applauded his zeal and his methods of working. Together with Sighele he issued a publication on Criminal Anthropology, richly illustrated with pictures, diagrams, and statistics, which met with favor even outside of strictly scientific circles. A remarkable book published by him is the Romance of a Born Criminal, the ​autobiography of a convict, founded on authentic papers committed to his hands by the eminent psychiatrist Silvio Yenturi, director of the lunatic asylum at Catanzaro, a book which was translated immediately on its appearance into German, but which no English publisher has had the courage to issue, though it states at once in its preface that its scope is purely scientific, and that the word "Romance" is employed in a subjective, sense. This piece of pathological literature throws a lurid light upon the inner nature of the criminal. Bianchi has written a long and careful preface, in which he points out just how and why this human document has scientific value. As yet, Bianchi has not had time to write many books, but his careful, studious articles are all of value, and denote his knowledge, intuition, and observation.
Limits of space, which we have already exceeded, oblige us to leave unmentioned yet other valiant followers of criminal anthropology in Italy, but we hope we have said enough to prove that this science has in the peninsula both numerous and able adherents, and that Italy is justified in considering herself at the head and front of studies of this nature—a position which, indeed, few dispute to her. Seeing how useful is this science as an auxiliary to the right study of history, literature, and political economy, it would be well if its propagation were more encouraged at universities, in place of philosophy and metaphysics, which, when untouched by this new breath, have become fossilized and are as arid as they are sterile.