superstitious believer in the reality of an experience and the victim of
an actual hallucination, to detect whether a condition of emotional
excitement or despair is a cause or an effect, is no less a
psychological problem than the more popularly discussed question of
compelling confession of guilt by the analysis of laboratory reactions.
It may well be that judges and lawyers and men of science will continue
to differ in their estimate of the aid which may come to the practical
pursuits from a knowledge of the relations as the psychologist presents
them in a non-technical, but yet systematic analysis. Professor Gross
believes thoroughly in its importance; and those who read his book will
arrive at a clearer view of the methods and issues that give character
to this notable chapter in applied psychology.
The author of the volume is a distinguished representative of the modern
scientific study of criminology, or “criminalistic” as he prefers to
call it. He was born December 26th, 1847, in Graz (Steiermark), Austria,
pursued his university studies at Vienna and Graz, and qualified for the
law in 1869. He served as “Untersuchungsrichter” (examining magistrate)
and in other capacities, and received his first academic appointment as
professor of criminal law at the University of Czernowitz. He was later
attached to the German University at Prague, and is now professor in the
University of Graz. He is the author of a considerable range of volumes
bearing on the administration of criminal law and upon the theoretical
foundations of the science of criminology. In 1893 he issued his
“Handbuch für Untersuchungsrichter, als System der Kriminalistik,” a
work that reached its fifth edition in 1908, and has been translated
into eight foreign languages. From 1898 on he has been the editor of the
“Archiv für Kriminalanthropologie und Kriminalistik,” of which about
twenty volumes have appeared. He is a frequent contributor to this
journal, which is an admirable representative of an efficient technical
aid to the dissemination of interest in an important and difficult
field. It is also worthy of mention that at the University of Graz he
has established a Museum of Criminology, and that his son, Otto Gross,
is well known as a specialist in nervous and mental disorders and as a
contributor to the psychological aspects of his specialty. The volume
here presented was issued in 1897; the translation is from the second
and enlarged edition of 1905. The volume may be accepted as an
authoritative exposition of a leader in his “Fach,” and is the more
acceptable for purposes of translation, in that the wide interests of
the writer and his sympathetic handling of his material impart an
unusually readable quality to his pages.
JOSEPH JASTROW.
MADISON, WISCONSIN,
DECEMBER, 1910.
AUTHOR’S PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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