Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/772

750 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 pyschiatricpsychiatric [sic] 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