678 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ENRICO FERRI ON HOMICIDE. 



By HELEN ZIMMERN. 



FIRST PAPER. 



ENRICO FERRI, the pupil and collaborator of Cesare Lom- 

 broso in the science of Criminal Anthropology, which the 

 latter may almost be said to have created, has just published a 

 truly monumental work consisting of over seven hundred closely 

 printed pages and an appendix of over three hundred, in which he 

 subjects to a most searching and minute examination the problem 

 of homicide from the point of view of Criminal Anthropology. In 

 it he treats of the murderer by instinct or from madness, reserv- 

 ing for future treatment the cases due to occasion and passion. 

 This huge book is the result of nearly thirteen years' work, dur- 

 ing which it has been often interrupted by Ferri's legal and par- 

 liamentary labors. These interruptions have not been without 

 their benefit. As a criminal lawyer he had much opportunity 

 of coming in contact with criminals and of studying them closely, 

 and he is convinced that his work has gained rather than lost 

 from the circumstance of its having been so long on the stocks. 

 He has taken as his watchword Michelet's " La science de la 

 justice et la science de la nature sont une. II faut que la justice 

 devienne une me'decine s'^clairant des sciences psychologiques et 

 physiologiques " ; and it is on these calm lines that the whole 

 work is penned. The author's purpose, in writing this book, was 

 to demonstrate the methods by which we should endeavor to 

 study the natural genesis of every crime in order to acquire posi- 

 tive and special knowledge of the causes of criminal phenomena, 

 to deduce thence certain indications as to the most efficacious 

 remedies, which should be at the same time the most effective 

 and the most humane, to be applied against these symptoms of 

 social pathology, to bring into relief more especially those data 

 which will explain the genesis of murder, serve to delineate its 

 psychological diagnosis as it affects each individual who commits 

 it, and hence give the degree in which he is to be feared, ac- 

 cording to the anthropological category to which he belongs. 

 Starting from the axiom that the elementary notion of homicide 

 as a criminal fact that is to say, that the murder of one man by 

 another is totally inadequate to satisfy the demands of contem- 

 porary penal science, which has been fundamentally reconstituted 

 by the new methods of positive research he deems that he must 

 conduct his study to the true origin of these phenomena. Hence 

 the necessity of a twofold inquiry : first, that bearing on the natu- 

 ral evolution of homicide, which includes in its vast domain the 



