Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/774

752 as a Society Function, which has aroused the fury of the clerical and moderate factions in Italy. Chips from the workshop of his extraordinarily prolific brain, ever evolving new ideas, new points of view, he scatters in the many articles he loves to write for English and American periodicals; but his most important scientific communications he reserves for the Archivio di Psichiatria, which he edits together with Ferri and Garofolo. His work is by no means perfect: he is apt to jump too rapidly at conclusions, to accept data too lightly; thus he was led at the beginning to overestimate the atavistic element in the criminal, and at a later date he has pressed too strongly the epileptic affinities of crime. Still, when all is said and done, his work is undoubtedly epoch-making, and has opened up valuable new lines of investigation and suggested others.

We said that Lombroso's first studies were directed to the pellagra, that strange and terrible disease which annually mows down such a vast number of victims in the fair land of northern Italy, and which is a luminous proof of the grave financial condition of the laborers in some of the most beautiful and richest regions of the world. Concerning this terrible illness, which densely populates Italian madhouses, all students of natural science have long been gravely occupied. For the terrible increase in lunacy noted by Italian statistics in the last five years the pellagra is largely responsible. Psychiatry, which has abandoned the old methods in Italy, is no longer a jailer employing the methods of an inquisitor, but a science that seeks for ultimate causes and remedies, and, conjoined to economic and political science, endeavors to restore to society a large contingent of forces which would otherwise be destroyed by disease. Especially active in this department is Enrico Morselli, at present director of the hospital attached to the Genoa University. Morselli is in the flower of his life, and much may be still hoped from him. Like Lombroso, he is small of stature and