Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 44.djvu/570

556 asylum at Girifalco, who was able to know, observe, and study the subject of this book."

Bianchi defines Antonino M. as a graphomaniac. His memoirs are important documents in many ways. For example, they help us to estimate how far those modern and ancient writers were sincere who have given to us real or fancied confessions. In some respects, mutatis mutandis, these pages recall to our minds Rousseau's famous Confessions. Here, as there, we encounter an absolute lack of the sense of shame which seems a distinctive feature of the instinctive criminal. And who, judging Rousseau by modern standards, would deny that he had in him many traits of the born criminsil? This work should make jurists and sociologists pause to think Surely prison life should turn out its inmates not only punished but corrected. Yet from these pages we learn that they are apt to issue forth more expert thieves than they entered. This book is really to the thoughtful an indirect apologia for capital punishment.

Signor Bianchi's book is a new proof of how incessantly the positive school of criminal anthropology labors in Italy, and what many and diverse modes they adopt to make known and to popularize their science.

book makes no claim to originality, but is an excellent summary of the most probable conclusions of modern scholarship on the questions discussed. It covers the ground admirably for so small a work. It is reverent in spirit and judicious in statement, and all who desire to know just what the best thought on biblical criticism is should read this book. Its chapters on the canon, the text, and the infallibility of the Scriptures are specially fine and interesting, and it is astonishing that any one, with such facts before him as are here stated, can believe in the inerrancy of the Bible, and it is still more astounding that those who dispute this dogma should be expelled from the Church. The vexed question of the Pentateuch, or rather the Hexateuch, the origin and authorship of the Old Testament histories, the Psalms, the Prophecies, etc., the composition of the Gospels and Epistles of the New Testament are all ably discussed. The author holds that "sacred books or Bibles come into being naturally. They are a necessary and inevitable outgrowth of the religious nature of man." Again he says: "Our Bible, particularly our New Testament, is greatly superior to any of the Bibles of the so-called heathen peoples. But the difference is one of degree, not of kind." He denies the mechanical theory of inspiration, which makes the Bible writers mere penmen of the Deity, but admits that they were "quickened by touch with the Infinite Mind and illuminated by that Light which lighteth every man that Cometh into the world." These quotations are sufficient to give a general idea of the nature of the book. An excellent bibliographical appendix is added.

this volume Dr. Ebers tells of his family relations in childhood, of his school days, of the beginning of his career, and of the friendships he formed, with only a single sensational element in the political disturbances of 1848; and we follow the whole with deep interest. As he was born in a country quarter of Berlin where now the city is dense around, before there were railroads, when the journey to his grandfather's in Holland required several days, and when tinder boxes had not been superseded by matches, his story helps us realize the extent of the social changes that have taken place. Remarkable changes have likewise been wrought during his lifetime in the political affairs of Germany; and nothing gives him more cause for gratitude "than the boon of being permitted to see the realization and fulfillment of the dream of so many former nations and my dismembered native land united into one grand, beautiful whole. I deem it a great happiness to have been a contemporary of Emperor William I, Bismarck, and von Moltke, witnessed their great deeds as a man of mature years, and shared the enthusiasm which enabled these men to make our German Fatherland the powerful united land it is to-day." A picture is given of the revolutionary excitement of 1848 in Berlin. Dr. Ebers passed through the