Professor Lombroso died at Turin on Tuesday at the age
of seventy-three. When appointed Professor of Psychiatry atPavia he unfolded in his inaugural address the chief ideas of his famous work, "Genius and Insanity." As Professor of Psychiatry at Turin he pursued his criminological researches, and was the first to apply the anthropometrio method in the study of crime. His books, "The Mile Delinquent" and "The Female Delinquent," are undeniably brilliant in spite of their erratic qualities, in our judgment, he reached most unwarrantable conclusions from premisses which were necessarily slender. According to his theory, crime is an atavistic reversion to an earlier and less developed type. He declared that nearly all criminals are afflicted by nervous disease; and genius, according to his researches, turns out to be only a particular form of epilepsy. The danger of his teaching is that the degree of personal responsi- bility is enormously underestimated. A man who has inclinations towards murder does not have his power or resistance reinforced when told that if he has a particular form of skull, or a "criminal ear," or an arm of the wrong length, he can hardly help himself. Nor are men with anarchical tendencies saved to sanity when they are told that great waves of political ferment are bound to recur like epidemics of influenza. In spite of his excesses, Lombroso of course did most distinguished work, and he led other minds into fruitful researches in criminology.
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