200 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



crime is in its nature really a mental defect at all is of course a 

 psychological one. I do not wish to disparage the anthropological 

 investigations of the Italian school as far as they have been made 

 with due severity of method as some of them have not but, 

 allowing that much has been done and that much more will be 

 done by the investigation of the physical side, it still remains 

 true that the closer approach to the real criminal must be from 

 the psychological side. Suppose, for example, we should admit 

 the results of Lombroso, Ferri, and the rest, and say that there 

 are certain physical " stigmates," or signs, which are found more 

 often singly or together in law-breakers than in any law-abiding 

 group of people, still two very important questions would have 

 to be asked and answered before we should have the first start 

 toward a real science of the criminal as such. First, What pro- 

 portion of people who are potential criminals do not become law- 

 hrealcers ? and, second, Wliat proportion of the laiv-hreakers are 

 not crimiiials ? The first question asks us to decide what type of 

 mind is a potential criminal, or what degree of abnormity, social 

 obliquity, etc., a man must have to be a criminal. This calls for 

 a psychological definition of criminality. The second question 

 takes us in exactly the same direction ; for to ask how many law- 

 breakers are not criminals is to admit that there are degrees of 

 abnormal defect which the law takes cognizance of simply be- 

 cause more appropriate agencies do not. There are men and 

 women in the jails who ought to be in reformatories, and others 

 in the reformatories who ought to be in the asylums. This, then, 

 calls upon us for a psychological determination of the lower limit 

 of criminality the limit below which we are dealing with the 

 insane and the irresponsible as the former question calls for the 

 upper limit, that which sets bounds to the class of criminals who 

 are never caught by the law at all. Both of these are accordingly 

 psychological questions ; and the main value of the results of the 

 so-called criminal anthropology, as so far worked up, is to set 

 these problems clearly in the light, especially the latter one. To 

 establish moral atavism for one class of men, and degeneracy for 

 another class, and criminal heredity in this fashion or that, is to 

 throw these classes out of the really criminal class altogether, as 

 far as any psychological definition which is now in sight would 

 seem to indicate. 



It is mentioned as a characteristic of Japanese artists that they will not 

 repeat identical elements. They, in fact, understand the difference between 

 the meanings of the terms "likewise" and "also," and they will have none 

 of the latter. Accordingly, of fifty stencils of theirs recently published in 

 an art work, there is not one which in all respects reproduces another, 

 although there are many which resemble one another. 



