When it is said that the average of life is 32 years, and that the month least (? most) fatal to life, is December, no one understands by this that all or almost all men should die at the age of 32 years and in the month of December; but I am not the only one to make this restriction. In order to show this I have to cite the definition which Monsieur Topinard, himself the most inveterate of my adversaries, gives in his remarkable work "The Type," says Gratiolet, "is a synthetic expression." "The Type," says Goethe, is "the abstract and general image" which we deduce from the observation of the common parts and from the differences. "The type of a species," adds Isidorus St. Helaire, "never appears before our eyes but is perceived only by the mind." "Human types," writes Broca, "have no real existence, they are only abstract conceptions, ideals, which come from the comparison of ethnic varieties, and are composed of an ENSEMBLE of characters common to a certain degree among themselves." I agree with these different points of view. The type is indeed an ENSEMBLE of traits, but in relation to a group which it characterises, it is also the ENSEMBLE of its most prominent traits, and those repeating themselves, whence comes a series of consequences which the anthropologist should never lose sight of either in his laboratory or in the midst of the populations of Central Africa." Manouvrier opposes Lombroso's theory and denies the existence of the type. He argues that if it exist at all it must be universal, whereas the peculiarities noted by Lombroso are present in honest as well as in criminal persons, the latter having, however, the greater proportion.