The use he is able to make of such individuals for the elucidation of sociological ideas is dependent upon his own peculiar gifts. He has an extraordinarily keen insight into whatever is important and characteristic in an individual; and his grasp of the significance of the facts thus obtained is due to his remarkable talent for the discovery of analogies. But if he had been endowed with this talent alone, a talent possessed also by the German natural philosophers of the beginning of the nineteenth century, he would not have gone beyond the formulation of mere hypotheses; but owing to his wealth of coinable metal (to use Goethe’s simile)—owing, that is to say, to his possession of a limitless abundance of intuitions peculiar to himself—he was able to pass beyond the simple formulation of brilliant hypotheses; his intuitive endowments enabled him to say with Bacon: “Intellectum longius a rebus non abstrahimus, quam ut rerum imagines et radii (ut in sensu fit) coire possint.” Thus, clear perceptions, the utilization of analogy as an organon of research, a grasp of the important and characteristic elements of concrete phenomena—these are the means employed by Lombroso in sociological research. Superadded to these, there arose in him, as a result of his mental development, a strong conviction of the importance of enumeration and mensuration, inducing him to accumulate a colossal mass of data relating to all the subjects investigated by him, to collect statistical data of anthropometry, demography, economic, moral, criminal, and social statistics. It was, moreover, a fact of great importance to the extension of sociological knowledge, that his collection of data was notably facilitated by brilliantly-grounded and broadly-based official statistical inquiries instituted in Italy during the last three decades of the nineteenth century, and also by the results of comprehensive parliamentary investigations. In the absence of the great “Inchiesta Agraria” (Agrarian Investigation), his researches into the causes of pellagra, the widely-diffused and destructive disease affecting the agricultural labourers and small farmers of Northern and Central Italy, would hardly have been possible. Equally important for the anthropometrical researches which, when army surgeon in Calabria in the year 1862, he initiated upon the mixed population of that region (then containing no Latin admixture, but composed of Greek, Albanian, and Sicilio-African elements), was the publication of the recruiting statistics, by means of which it is comparatively easy to ascertain the racial composition of the Italian people; whilst to German anthropology and sociology this indispensable material is almost as inaccessible as are the Italian plans of mobilization.