Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/776

754 and versatile intelligence, but he has lowered it in the search after cash and easy success. This handsome old man, with the face and smile of a satyr, is a familiar figure on the streets of Florence.

The number of men who are strict anthropologists without being sociologists is extraordinarily great in contemporary Italy, and there is none of them who has not done good and original work. Limits of space oblige us perforce to pass them by, in order to speak of yet others of the new school created by Lombroso's theories, and who take rank in the files of criminal anthropology, a science far more interesting to the general reader than that which deals with biology pure and simple. To this section in the first rank belong the alienists, besides a large number of lawyers, judges, and journalists. The highest position among them belongs indubitably to Enrico Ferri. His verdict, like that of Cesare Lombroso, is constantly appealed to in complicated criminal cases where the sanity or the natural proclivity to crime of the person is in question. A man of really unusual physical beauty is Enrico Ferri, as well as of charm of manner and of eloquence which, when stirred to a theme dear to his heart, carries all before it. Enrico Ferri was born in 1856, in the neighborhood of Mantua, a city whose very name in Austrian days was synonymous with cruel despotism, for this and Spielburg were the favorite fortresses of the German persecutors. At a tender age he lost his father, and his mother, left in straitened circumstances, had a hard struggle to give her only child an adequate education. Already at the university Ferri distinguished himself, publishing a thesis which dealt with criminal law. When Lombroso published his great work on Criminal Man, Ferri was at once attracted by its scientific nature and sought to become acquainted with its author. Since then they have been fast friends as well as co-workers. In 1881 he was called to fill the chair of penal law at the University of Bologna. His opening discourse dealt with the theme which was to prove the first draft of his great work, Criminal Sociology, a work which has been translated into many European tongues. The lecture was entitled New Horizons in Penal Law. He says: "It was in this inaugural discourse that I affirmed the existence of the positivist school of criminal law, and assigned to it these two fundamental rules: 1. While the classical schools of criminal law have always studied the crime and neglected the criminal, the object of the positivist school was, in the first place, to study the criminal, so that, instead of the crime being regarded merely as a juridical fact, it must be studied with the aid of biology, of psychology, and of criminal statistics as a natural and social fact, transforming the old criminal law into a criminal sociology. 2. While the classical schools, since Beccaria and