Finally, the incorrigibility of many criminals, and their innumerable relapses into crime, afford a proof, not merely of the uselessness of our penal systems, but also of the organic nature of the predisposition to crime. All the experience hitherto recorded shows that those individuals who, anthropologically speaking, exhibit the most severe stigmatization, are also the most hopeless recidivists. It is a point much open to dispute whether the congenital tendency to crime is essentially a morbid predisposition; but the discussion is profitless. Unquestionably the professional criminal throughout his life exhibits a marked tendency to mental disorder. Many of Lombroso’s adherents are inclined to regard insanity as a professional disease of prisoners. It must not, however, be forgotten that debauchery, poverty, alcoholism, and close confinement—conditions inseparable from the criminal life—would suffice of themselves, and in the absence of any predisposition to insanity, to induce mental disorder. This has nothing whatever to do with the problem of the responsibility of the born criminal. In the most exceptional case we can admit that the criminal is strongly predisposed to become insane. This is a suitable place in which to draw attention to the fact that Lombroso himself emphasizes the relationships between epilepsy and the criminal nature; and, indeed, that he draws an analogy between the permanent psychical state of the born criminal and the conditions of brain giving rise to epilepsy. To some extent, indeed, he regards the two conditions as identical. His account of these relationships exhibits the characteristic features of his mode of thought. He possessed the impassioned tendency of the great investigator of Nature, as it was also embodied in Darwin; and he possessed at the same time the patience of the collector. He knew, also, how to demonstrate his results forcibly and vividly; but he was less richly endowed with the faculty of sifting his data, and of grouping them in accordance with a natural, and not merely superficial, criterion. Thus it happened often enough that, perceiving intuitive analogies, his lively imagination led him falsely to regard them as identities. He tells us that in the criminal, as in the epileptic, he discovered the following characteristics: “Tendency to lead a vagabond life, inclination to obscenity, uncleanness, pride in evil actions, a passion for scribbling, a tendency to neologism, tattooing, dissimulation, lack of definite character, easily aroused to wrath, megalomania, vacillations of thought and feeling, cowardice. In epileptic and criminal alike, we find a lengthening of the personal equation (reaction-time), when compared with the normal human being; the same vanity, the same tendency to self-contradiction and to universal exaggeration.” He considered that this identity was confirmed by the similarities which can be detected between criminals and epileptics in