SPONTANEOUS AND IMITATIVE CRIME. 663 



good and noble thoughts particularly among the young of the tempted 

 classes. ; for all normal or abnormal action is derived from the thoughts, 

 and as the thoughts are, so will the life be. In those particular locali- 

 ties where crime seeks to shelter and hide itself among numbers, the 

 suggestions to wrong-doing are ever present, and the young, who as 

 yet have the criminal instinct only latent, but who still must be re- 

 garded from the circumstances as incipient criminals, are the objects 

 which offer the best promises of success in any effort for the reduction 

 of crime. There is also this promising feature in reformatory efforts, 

 that the moral emotions, once thoroughly awakened, do not satiate 

 and deaden by exercise, like many pleasurable vices ; they are not in 

 their nature exhaustive, but strengthen by habit and prove more satis- 

 fying by use and perseverance, till they become almost automatic, 

 when the individual may be considered practically safe. 



It is well understood by natural scientists that in the noblest forms 

 of animal life such, for instance, as the thoroughbred horse the 

 likeness of parent and offspring is much more strongly marked than 

 in lower forms of life. If we carry our investigations low enough 

 down to the border-land between the animal and vegetable kingdoms, 

 such as some forms of marine life, hydro-zouphytes, salpa, and me- 

 dusas we discover a curious law of unlikeness or alternation of forms, 

 in which the immediate offspring are totally unlike their progenitors, 

 but possess a resemblance to their ancestors one degree further re- 

 moved, and this alternation goes on with an invariable tendency in the 

 third generation to revert to the form of the first instead of assuming 

 that of the second. This polymorphic tendency of low types of life 

 is also illustrated in the vegetable world, for, while the higher classes 

 retain, under all conditions, their normal form, whether planted in 

 favorable or unfavorable soil (the oak is still an oak, the rose a rose), 

 the germs of the simpler fungi develop surprising variations of form 

 if placed on different kinds of decomposing matter ; so far have these 

 changes proceeded as to cause investigators to mistake them, not only 

 for different species, but for different genera. It thus appears to be 

 a law of nature that the nobler the production the more type-giving 

 power it possesses, while the weaker and simpler are dominated by cir- 

 cumstances, and, if weak and low enough, do not necessarily impress 

 their own image on their successors. May not this law apply to some 

 extent to the human race ? The nobler specimens of humanity will, 

 we know, maintain their manhood and moral integrity under the most 

 adverse circumstances, but, if we get down low enough in the human 

 scale, shall we not find the fungi of the race, the weakest of our 

 brothers, who have not moral stamina enough to hold their own 

 elected way, but ever show themselves the creatures of circumstances, 

 and are developed into just such moral or immoral characters as their 

 environments suggest ? These are the people whose course is always 

 " in the direction of the least resistance," who, if they are placed un- 



