Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/736

 REVIEWS.

Genesis del Crimen en Mexico. By JULIO GUERRERO. Paris and Mexico: Ch. Bouret, 1901. Pp. xiv+394, i6mo.

No RECENT Mexican work along sociological lines has more impor- tance than Julio Guerrero's Genesis del Crimen en Mexico " Origin of Crime in Mexico." The name is hardly appropriate. The book is less a study of the origin of crime in Mexico than an analysis of the whole Mexican society, and an effort to find the physical and social influences that have shaped it. The volume is divided into five books, dealing with: I, "The Atmosphere;" II, "The Territory;" III, "Cita- dism;" IV, "Atavisms;" V, "Creeds." In the first and second of these an effort is made to refer some features in Mexican character to cli- matic conditions and some facts in Mexican history to topography. In both these discussions startling suggestions are made; and although the reader may not follow the author to all his conclusions, he is given matter for serious thought. A quotation will illustrate Guerrero's style and mode of thought, as well as the impossibility of always accepting his conclusions :

This atmosphere, pure and luminous, full of slumberous breezes in the shade and of debilitating heat in the sunshine, capricious and treacherous, not only has an influence upon the physiology, pathology, and life of the Mexicans, but it gives to much of their labor an unstable character. In fact, as permanent rivers are few in those great plains, and as those which exist are due to rain, the sowings of the rainy season, which are the more important, and their fruition, where there are no rivers, demand rains. But since, on the other hand, deforestation, carried on since before the vice-reinal days, has been destructive, not only are lacking forests and groups of trees, which, as thermal centers uniformly distributed over the higher plateau, might give shelter to the sowings against the chill of night and early morning, or which, in the guise of fences of foliage, might intercept the cold blasts of northers ; but also, through their lack, rains have become rare and irregular, there being regions where they have failed for six, seven, and eight consecutive years ; as happened in the Mezquital of the state of Hidalgo, the llano district of Chihuahua, and the north of the state of Nuevo Leon in the years 1887 to 1895. In 1892 and 1893 the drought was general and desolated a great part of the Central Plateau.

When the season of rains arrives, the fields are transformed in a single

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