Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/765

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F 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.