MOORCROFT, PARKSTONE, DORSET. _Christmas, 1910._ CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE PREFACE v I. ANTECEDENTS—LOMBROSO’S PREDECESSORS IN RESEARCH 1 II. CRIMINAL ANTHROPOLOGY 18 III. OPPOSITION TO LOMBROSO’S VIEWS—WOMAN AS CRIMINAL—THE POLITICAL CRIMINAL—CRIMINAL PSYCHOLOGY 55 IV. GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS REGARDING LOMBROSO’S LIFE-WORK AS A SOCIAL REFORMER, HIS METHODS, AND HIS PHILOSOPHY 106 V. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF CRIMINAL ANTHROPOLOGY 130 VI. CRIMINAL JURISPRUDENCE—PELLAGRA—AGRARIAN REFORM 139 VII. ENVIRONMENT AND THE THEORIES AS TO THE NATURE OF GENIUS—LOMBROSO’S GENIUS AND PERSONALITY 158 APPENDIX A. LOMBROSO’S SPIRITUALISTIC RESEARCHES 167 APPENDIX B. LIST OF BOOKS CONSULTED 177 APPENDIX C. FACTS AND DOCUMENTS OF POSITIVISM 178 INDEX 182 CESARE LOMBROSO CHAPTER I ANTECEDENTS—LOMBROSO’S PREDECESSORS IN RESEARCH Cesare Lombroso was born in Verona, as an Austrian subject, on November 6, 1835, and was the second child in a family of five. His father Aron sprang from a Venetian mercantile family, whose origin can be traced back to a colony of North African Jews, trading with Leghorn, Genoa, and Venice. Again and again members of the Lombroso family settled in one or other of these ports. The branch to which he himself belonged had lived for several centuries in Venice and the Venetian territories on the mainland, of which from the year 1448 onwards Verona formed a part; they were patrician merchants, to whom the French occupation, occurring before Lombroso’s father grew up, had brought full and equal privileges of citizenship.[1] Several members of this Venetian family were distinguished by characteristic and vigorous action on behalf of the cause of enlightenment. In Virginia, North America, in the seventeenth century, the brother of a direct ancestor of Cesare Lombroso, at a great risk to himself of being burned alive, protested most energetically against the belief in witchcraft, and declared that the reputed witches were “hysterical” merely. The French emancipation of Upper Italy was followed in 1814 by the Austrian reaction, but the family suffered at this time from the decline in economic prosperity (interrupted for a while in 1830, when Venice became a free port) upon which its own well-being and patrician position had been dependent.