Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 56.djvu/556

540 righteousness is resolved into heredity, structure, and habit; living is a mere puppet show, and the wreck of things impends. If Lombroso

is right, modern scientific methods are sure to prove him so, and we shall have at last sound theories; but we shall have no world in which they can be used, for the dissolution predicted by Herbert Spencer will have come.

Exceptional opportunities for the study of the abnormal classes in the institutions of this country and Europe have given me a personal interest in the question of the criminal type. I have discovered that the criminal anthropologists do not choose for comparison with the prison population their normal men from the ranks where the criminal classes are recruited. Blackwell's Island has 110 more peculiar inmates than abound in sections of New York near the East River; the residents of the Whitechapel district of London may be compared with the inmates of Pentonville, to the distinct credit of the latter; and the man in Roquette is no worse off