Call mental research by what name you will: state it in esoteric terms laden with syllables, or so plainly that a recent past master at making mud pies can understand, and it must still be led, as well as leading, else miss the mark. Stamps of stigma are essentially subversive of the end sought. Designate a lad by a disgraceful name, and you create the strongest of initial motive for him to earn the name. Moreover, such procedure is usually as senseless as harmful, since it is not within human gift to declare the morrow of the disease-free, pre-adolescent mind. The writer is moved to stress this paragraph, because he has observed so many cases whereof full-blown puberty has marked mental metamorphosis; marked it both as to the positive and negative, the which will usually depend on the sum of the subject's bringing-up, inclusive, of course, of the sum of his environment; and partly on his intrinsic moral fibre, born at his birth. And recollect that juvenile predilections usually mark the confirmed criminal to be. In any case, the negative conclusion should wait upon indubitable evidence; and the positive, general statement be mostly guardedly made, since the scales will likely tip to the weight of influence, and that may be in the lap of change entirely beyond the ken of "little man." God, alone, disposes, alike as to mind and matter. Furthermore, pre-criminal motivations are never singular; hence the single-seeing reformer, or investigator, cuts no swath in complex, crowding crime. And furthermore, his conclusions may be absolutely correct, and his mode of applying remedial measures be diametrically at variance with the crying exactions of his subject. Then again, crime is not a disease in the sense that it is so lightly proclaimed. Crime may eventuate mainly because of congenital flaw, physical, mental, or both; or it may crop out by acquirement in spite of a sound heredity; but it always issues to relative mental disease in the sense that habitually oblique reasoning becomes master of the subject, either tentatively, or for good and all; tentatively, if the constant weight of influence is preponderantly in his favor, and permanently under the reverse circumstance.