During the period 1879 to 1894 were held the first three International Congresses of Criminal Anthropology; and the same period was signalized by numerous other performances of Lombroso, which served for the propagation, the development, and the application of his ideas. Thus it happened that he was forced to leave the quiet of the laboratory and the study; the greatest publicity was gained for the “new school”; and the investigator who, until the age of one-and-forty, had lived at Pavia, remote from the world, became involved in unending controversy. By the best elements of Italian political radicalism Lombroso was now regarded as leader; and a little later also, during the years 1880 and 1890, through the support of the slowly developing Marxist School of Socialism,[44] Lombroso found himself leader in a movement at first dominated entirely by “intellectuals.” It soon appeared that the retired and modest investigator was none the less a formidable opponent, whose voice could make itself heard in all the great questions of public life, and far beyond the bounds of Italy. I need mention here only the two great epidemics of anarchism and anti-Semitism, whose flood-tide fell in this period between 1880 and 1892. Lombroso was a man of harmonious type, a radical through and through, one who could not understand that anyone who had once grasped a truth should be induced to conceal it from social class-considerations. What those may have to suffer who are ill-adapted for the utterance of half-truths, and who are averse from compromise, Lombroso had learned when he came to publish his researches into the cause of pellagra, the characteristic endemic disease of Northern Italy. Pellagra is a chronic disease in Northern and Central Italy, which gives rise to extensive disturbances of digestion and to cutaneous and nervous disorders, and frequently leads to severe mental disturbance. In Lombroso’s view it results from the frequent use of damaged maize, containing toxins, which is consumed by the peasantry of Northern and Middle Italy in the form of polenta and maize bread, whilst the ground landlords and their bailiffs live upon the better qualities of maize produced by the same peasants. I may quote here a passage from the Preface to my German translation of Lombroso’s book on pellagra: