Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/773

Rh 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 srictlystrictly [sic] 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