534 _
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
