The Introduction to this book, 180 pages in length, appears to me to be the most interesting and remarkable piece of work Lombroso ever issued. Even his opponents never denied his all-embracing culture and extraordinarily wide reading, nor his brilliant intuitive powers and bold faculty for combination; on the other hand, his most zealous advocates and adherents have always complained of his obvious neglect of critical examination of his sources of information, of analytical treatment and systematic arrangement of his material, and of comprehensive presentation and definitive architectonic. But nowhere else are his merits so strikingly manifest, and nowhere else are his defects less conspicuous, than they are in this brilliant description of the biological and physiological characteristics of woman and accurate survey of the differences between the sexes. In part, indeed, the work under consideration may owe its conspicuous merits in point of style and arrangement to the fact that Lombroso’s own deficiencies in these respects were supplemented by the assistance of his collaborator and subsequent son-in-law, G. Ferrero, the author of the celebrated “History of the Roman Empire.” However this may be, Lombroso in this work penetrates deeply into the science of general biology, and endeavours, having regard to the characters found by him to differentiate woman from man, to formulate a comprehensive law of sexual differentiation in general. He refers this differentiation to the fact that the whole organization of woman is predestined to motherhood, and to the fact that any other professional activity of whatever kind is hardly possible to her, or, if possible, only on account of an abnormal and degenerative predisposition. With this dominant position of motherhood in woman he correlates also two facts of great importance in the anthropology of the female offender. The first of these is the much lesser variability of women,[17] owing to which women in general exhibit less marked special differentiation than men; consequently such deviations from type as do occur in women are far more significant than similar deviations occurring in men, and therefore in women very great importance must be attached even to isolated theromorphs. The second fundamental fact is the lesser general sensibility and lesser sensibility to pain of women as compared with men. Both these phenomena of sexual differentiation are more strongly marked among civilized races than they are among savages. Thus, according to Lombroso’s investigations, the female skull, especially in the civilized races, resembles rather the skull of the child than that of the adult male, and this is especially the case as regards its frontal and facial portions.