Morel, through the vagueness of his definition of degeneration (“déviation maladive du type humain”), was himself partly to blame for the unsatisfactory development of the whole doctrine. He had correctly observed that unfavourable conditions of life—for example, the lack of legislative enactments for the protection of factory workers during the middle of the last century—transformed the entire outward appearance of those exposed to such conditions; but he failed to distinguish between inherited and acquired characteristics, nor did he ask himself if and how acquired characteristics are inherited; and he omitted to determine at the outset of his inquiry what were the precise characteristics of the type, deviations from which he was recording. With the exception of Lombroso, those who, after Morel, dealt with the problem of degeneration ignored the fact that these problems transcend the narrow limits of pathology to trespass on the wider province of biology, and failed to see that the problems in question are those of human variability, of the laws of inheritance, and other anthropological questions. Prichard, the distinguished ethnologist, widely regarded (in company with the English prison surgeons Thomson and Nicolson) as a predecessor of Lombroso, was the first to detect what is typical in the outward appearance of old “gaol-birds,” and to put forward, in explanation of confirmed criminality, the conception of moral insanity. This moral monstrosity was to be regarded as correlated with the abnormal physical characteristics. Lombroso found it necessary again and again to elaborate the doctrine of moral insanity; and in the long-continued campaign against the misunderstandings to which his theory of the _homo delinquens_ was exposed, that doctrine played a much more important part than Morel’s theory of degeneration. It is incorrect to speak of Prichard and Morel as _predecessors_ of Lombroso, in a sense implying that the latter was influenced by either of the two former in the inception or development of his teachings. Just as little is it true of Gall, whose work was justly estimated by Lombroso as early as the year 1853, as we learn from his brief work on the correlation between sexual and cerebral development—“Di un fenomeno fisiologico commune ad alcuni nevrotteri.”[8] CHAPTER II CRIMINAL ANTHROPOLOGY