All offenders, except the most degenerate types, born criminals or the morally insane, desire work or occupation of some kind, and books of an interesting character. This demand emanates from innumerable inscriptions on the walls of cells and the margins of prison books: "How unbearable is enforced idleness for a man who has always been accustomed to work and study, and in whom activity and the desire of some ennobling pursuit are not quite extinct!" ... "The nun of Cracow cried, 'Bread, bread!' but my voice pleads from my solitary cell, 'Work, work!'" "If jurists would leave their desks and libraries," says my father in conclusion, "put aside all pre-conceived notions, enter the prisons and study the problem of criminality not on the walls of the cells, but on the living documents they enclose, they would speedily realise that all reforms evolved and applied without the aid of practical experience are only dangerous illusions." VII _Ancient and Modern Crimes_ (_Delitti Vecchi e Delitti Nuovi_) "This volume contains a collection of facts, sometimes valuable, at other times merely curious, that I was able to glean during long years of study in the field of criminal anthropology and psychiatry. They all tend to show the great difference that exists between ancient and modern crimes." With these words my father begins the preface to this book, in which cases of recent crimes are described and compared with those committed in by-gone ages. It is divided into three parts. The first part contains a comparative and statistical study of criminality in Europe, Mexico, the United States, and Australia. The second part describes the careers of typical criminals of former times, such as the Tozzis of Rome, a family of anthropophagous criminals, and Vacher, Ballor, and other assassins of the Jack-the-Ripper type, whose perverted sexual instincts prompted them to murder a number of women and mutilate the corpses in a horrible fashion. The third part treats of those modern criminals, like Holmes and Peace, who accomplish their misdeeds in a refined and elegant manner, substituting for the more brutal knife or hammer, the resources of chemistry, physics, and modern toxicology. In other cases, some product of modern times, such as the motor-car or bicycle, forms the motive for the crime, or is of assistance in its accomplishment. "From the data we have been able to gather relating to crime in by-gone ages," continues my father in his preface, "we are led to conclude that crimes of a violent and bloody nature predominated exclusively in more barbarous times, and that fraudulent offences are characteristic of modern communities. Violence is more primitive than trickery and must always precede it, exactly as a more barbarous state in which property is gained or maintained by force, at the point of the sword, precedes a state in which ownership is regulated by means of contracts; and crime always adapts itself to the prevailing customs.