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POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



the habitual criminal, and here no punishment will suffice. The man 

 must be treated as though afflicted with a serious illness and removed 

 from society, for which, however, he may and should be made to 

 work. He insists that these questions are of vital importance to 



every nation, and asserts re- 

 peatedly that teachers in 

 ragged schools and founders 

 of polytechnics are patriots 

 and philanthropists in the 

 highest sense of the words, 

 because helping to stamp out 

 crime more than all the long- 

 term sentences in the world. 

 Crime is at once a biological 

 and a social phenomenon. 

 The criminal is a microbe 

 which only flourishes on 

 suitable soil. Without doubt 

 it is the environment which 

 makes the criminal, but, like 

 the cultivation medium, 

 without the microbe it is 

 powerless to germinate the 

 crime. To use Professor 

 Ferri's expression, up to re- 

 cent times the criminal has 

 been regarded as a sort of algebraic formula; the punishment has 

 been proportioned not to the criminal but to the crime. Anthro- 

 pologists are teaching us to strive after scientific justice. Time and 

 events have brought into clear relief the inadequacy of legal maxims, 

 founded on antiquated and unscientific conceptions, and thus mod- 

 ern Italians show us that not the nature of the crime but the dan- 

 gerousness of the offender constitutes the only reasonable legal 

 criterion to guide the inevitable social reaction against the criminal. 

 This position is the legitimate outcome of the scientific study of the 

 criminal. And where the man of science has led the way the man 

 of law must follow. 



Such, in brief and somewhat in the rough, are the conclusions of 

 Italian criminal anthropology, which we have given at some length, 

 as the subject is too vast as well as too new to be clearly comprehen- 

 sible in a few words. In the autumn of 1896 an International Con- 

 gress of Criminal Anthropologists was held at Geneva, and on 

 this occasion the Italian school triumphed as never before over all 

 adversaries and schismatics, and especially over their French col- 



Enrico Ferri. 



