Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/780

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POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

nay, entirely with the legal side of criminal anthropology, and his great work Criminology deals with the means of repressing crime quite as much as with its nature and causes. He has also studied the question of what reparation is due to victims of crime. His only flight into sociology has concerned his attack on socialism, in whose curative Utopia he does not believe.

Among the latest contributors to this fascinating science the highest places belong to three young men: Scipio Sighele, Guglielmo Ferrero, and A. G. Bianchi. All three are journalists, all three distinguished by the same qualities of keen observation, of more than ordinary cultivation, with sometimes a tendency to write a little hastily and to jump to conclusions too rapidly. This reproof especially concerns Sighele, who has allowed himself to judge and write of matters English and American of which he has but the most superficial and second-hand knowledge. Here the newspaper writer has done wrong to the scientist. Sighele made his name with an admirable book entitled The Criminal Crowd, which a French writer has thought fit to appropriate in outline and almost entirely in substance, obtaining for it Scipio Sighele. the honor of translation into English, while the real author has been left out in the cold. Able, too, is The Criminal Couple. A paradoxical pamphlet directed against parliamentary government, and revealing the failure of a system on which the hopes of Europe were once based as the sheet-anchor of liberty, excited some attention on its appearance in 1895, and was dealt with at length in Blackwood's Magazine. His last work, on Individual Morality as opposed to Public Morality, inspired by the doubtful morality of Signor Crispi's government, also aroused discussion, especially among Crispi's adherents, who looked on the book as a bit of special pleading in favor of their master's dubious political proceedings.

Guglielmo Ferrero is a Piedmontese, and belongs to an old