466 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. I. No. 17. 



ployed by the modern Italian school in the 

 study of weak, imperfect, degenerate men 

 as found among the criminal and mentally 

 disordered classes, to the identification of 

 degenerates among m.odern authors and 

 artists. Such degenerates, he declares, 

 manifest the same mental characteristics, 

 and, for the most part, the same somatic 

 features, as do criminals, prostitutes and 

 lunatics. 



The physical characteristics, or ' stig- 

 mata,' as they are called, of degeneracy in 

 man consist of various malformations which 

 have been described and classified by Morel, 

 Lombroso and others, and which are relied 

 upon to some extent in the diagnosis of 

 doubtful cases of insanity, especially in 

 criminals. 



The mental stigmata of degeneracy are 

 also, in many respects, well known, and 

 consist in mental asymmetry, more or less 

 lack of the sense of morality, excessive 

 emotionalism, or its converse, i. e., abnormal 

 apathy and sluggishness, morbid despond- 

 ency, incapacity for continiied attention, 

 and lack of will power, tendency to ramb- 

 ling revery, mysticism, intense egotism, ab- 

 normal sexual instincts, etc. 



I^ordau distinguishes between the hysteri- 

 cal and the degenerate, applying the former 

 term to the admirers and followers of the 

 latter. In his sense there are quite as 

 many hysterical males as females. He is 

 not a physician, and his ideas of hysteria do 

 not precisely correspond with those of the 

 ordinary practitioner ; he is a literary critic 

 who has made a special study of morbid 

 mental phenomena and attempts to apply 

 this knowledge to the elucidation of the 

 characteristics of certain forms of modern 

 art and literature with which he is remark- 

 ably familiar. He takes up in succession 

 the impressionists, the mystics, the Pre-Ea- 

 phaelists, the symbolists and the decadents 

 and aesthetes, discussing Ruskin, Holman, 

 Hunt, Rossetti, Swinburne, Morris, Ver- 



laine, Mallarme, Tolstoi, Wagner, Peladan, 

 Maeterlinck, Baudelaire, Oscar "Wilde, Ib- 

 sen, Zola, N'ietzsche and many others. The. 

 only illustration of degeneracy in a scienti- 

 fic man which he gives is Zollner. His 

 criticisms of these are by no means scien- 

 tifically impartial ; they are at times almost 

 vituperative, but they are in the main just, 

 and substantiated by his cxuotations, and 

 his strong expressions of condemnation and 

 disgust will in the majority of cases meet 

 with sympathy on the part of an intelligent 

 reader, even if he does find some of the ad- 

 jectives too sweeping and unqualified. 



The chief defect of his work considered 

 from the scientific point of view is its want 

 of logical order ; it may almost be said to be 

 composed of two different works, composed 

 in two different moods, one of which was 

 strongly pessimistic, the other more calm 

 and impartial ; the first an eloquent appeal 

 to the emotions, the second addressed 

 rather to the reason, and these two parts 

 are so arranged and mixed that it is neces- 

 sary to read the book from cover to cover 

 and to rearrange and classify the matter in 

 one's own mind, before one can be reason- 

 ably sure that he knows the views of the 

 author, and this is the more neeessarj' be- 

 cause the book has no index. For exam- 

 ple, the first chapter entitled ' The Dusk of 

 the Nations,' is an eloquent piece of pessi- 

 mism, j'et ISTordau is by no means a pessi- 

 mist; in fact, he considers pessimism as one 

 of the stigmata of degeneration, and the 

 reader after finishing the first chapter 

 should next read the last two chapters, 

 which relate to the prognosis and treatment 

 of the disorder under discussion, in which 

 chapters the author points out that the 

 symptoms which he has described pertain 

 mainly to the scum or froth and to the dregs 

 of population, that the great mass of the 

 people are sound, that the degenerates can- 

 not maintain themselves in the struggle for 

 existence, and that humanity as a whole is 



