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The Green Bag

failed to notice them, need not consider them, but persons believing in them must

views in their later phase, when he had partly outgrown the tendency to over

be warned

against exaggeration and

emphasize his anthropological doctrine

haste. The one advice that can be given is to study the language of the hand before ofﬁcially ignoring it; not to decide immediately upon the value of the observations one is supposed to

of the "born criminal." The work is instructive on this account, and helpful to a fair estimate of Lombroso's position, and its utility is also to be found in its

have made, but to handle them cau tiously and to test them with later experiences.”

In choosing Lombroso's "Crime: Its Causes and Remedies” the Committee on Translations made a wise selection. The quente," ﬁrst published volume ofin “L'Uomo 1876, was Delin de

extended treatment of penologiml mat ters. It is a much more representative and useful exposition of Lombroso's philosophy, for the American criminolo gist, than his “Criminal Man." Nevertheless it should not be supposed

from the attention here

devoted to

social factors, that Lombroso's original

position has been so completely modiﬁed voted chieﬂy to his doctrine of the

as to place him in the ranks of the

"born

sociological school, or to

criminal,"

and

aroused

much

criticism of his one-sidedness. In the second volume he dealt with other types of criminal + the pseudo-criminal, the criminaloid and the habitual crimi nal —- and thus showed himself to attach by no means exclusive importance to the born criminal.

As he grew older

convict the

anti-Lombrosian criminologists of Ger many of ignorance of his actual opinions. Nor can it be said that De Quiros be trays any misinformation in classiﬂg

him with the anthropologists rather than with the sociologists. For Lombroso's doctrine, however strongly he may

his doctrine broadened itself in another

emphasize social factors, is

direction, for while in the ﬁrst edition

around a congenital cn'rninal type 85 its centre. His theory of such a type is,

of “L’Uomo Delinquente" he distin quished but one type, the atavistic, in later editions he partly rejected the atavistic theory of crime, and came to view degeneracy as the cause of congeni

tal criminality. This theory is assailable because of the looseness with which the term

"degeneracy" is employed and

because the doctrine does not rest upon a ﬁrm biological foundation. At the same time, as Professor Parmelee says in his able introduction, "this recognition of degeneracy as a cause of crime has made Lombroso's doctrine more catholic, so that it is much easier to connect the criminal with the social and physical

conditions out of which he has evolved.” The present work is largely concerned with the social causes of crime, and

it presents a summary of Lomhroso’s

built up

no doubt, partly scientiﬁc and partly a product of the brilliant imagination of an enthusiast singularly ill equipped, in knowledge of biology, psychology and pathology, for the task to which he applied himself with such marvelous assiduity. As time goes on only what

is true in his system will come to stand out in sharp relief against a background of false generalization, and he will be esteemed more for his convenient classi ﬁcation, his keen analysis of individual cases, and his wonderful divination of some new truths, than for the soundness

of his inductions or the harmonious proportions of his theory. Accordingly the ﬁrst part of this book, which deals with “The Etiology of Crime," though frequently illuminat