52 THE JUKES. 



decay is substantially in an inverse progression. Upon looking 

 over the statistics of the crime of rape I find that, for the young, 

 the age of maximum passion is 27, before the full development of 

 the judgment and will; that the fewest occur between the ages of 32 

 and 35, the age of maximum will-power ; but from this time we get 

 again an increase in the percentage of this offense. And why ? Be- 

 cause the willjwhich is the moral governor,tends to decay sooner than 

 the erotic passions, and the man's mind has lost, in part, the moral 

 balance which it possessed at 35, hence opportunity then becomes 

 temptation. This disposes in a general way of the main features 

 of the phenomena of the growth and decay of the organic life, but 

 in this case there is a still further lesson in the study of the environ- 

 ment which was contributive to the act. The circumstances which 

 determined this particular offense accord with the theory of action 

 taking the direction of least resistance. His niece accompanied him 

 alone to go fishing ; now fishing is not an employment requiring 

 labor of either mind or body, and so we find the element conspiring 

 to produce the crime is idleness, which left the full vitality of the 

 man to wreak itself in the direction of licentiousness. Laying 

 aside the collateral lesson here, and returning to the main fact to 

 be noted in the chain of argument, the features of it correspond to 

 the essential phenomena of growth, that, being punished for an 

 offense at 30 just before the meridian of life, his career is amended 

 during that period, but, as age approaches with its attendant weak- 

 ness, he breaks out at 49 into another form of crime, consonant with 

 the decline of life. 



Case2i2i' Take line 7, generation 5, brother of the above. At 22 

 he was a boatman, and in company with his brother-in-law he com- 

 mits a burglary, third degree, for which he serves sentence of three 

 years in Sing Sing. Discharged at 25 years of age, he ceases 

 crime and becomes an honest laborer, abandons boating on canal, 

 which is a vagrant occupation, and settles down. He is now 

 described by his employer as a steady, civil and reliable man. The 

 three years' continuous labor in prison, together with the fulness 

 of development attending maturity, have produced steady habits. 

 Here he gets industrial training before the meridian of life, and his 

 career is measurably amended. 



