Chamois-skin is softest of leather made of the skin of the chamois. The chamois abides on the loftiest ridges of the Alps and Pyrenees. Roaming those mountains, he employs unusual keenness and scope of vision, and displays singular agility in leaping from crag to crag, on which he lands non-skidding hoofs. Otherwise, the little climber's means of defense are negligible. While fleet of foot, he is at the mercy, in their domain, of long-toothed hunters endowed with the greater cunning and stamina. Similes miss the chamois-skin criminologist solely by the fact of criminological stunts he essays, but cannot manage. Undismayed by finite limitations, he dares the highest peaks of vision, from which he affects to train all-seeing eyes; springs nimbly from height to height in the mists of theory; rates them purblind mortals who dwell on the common plane below; and comes croppers in attempt to prescribe for fellow unfortunates who must needs work out life's problems close to the practical level. A further attribute of the chamois-skin is its sponge-like capacity for absorption. It has a voracious maw for either oil or water, and does its best to combine them. Here, again, the parallel persists. Be the idea-mixture of reform never so impossible, the mind of the chamois-skin criminologist soaks it in, while he waxes cocksure of his call to euchre nature with it at the game of synthesis. Thereto hangs a sometime ludicrous, sometime tragic tale. It is ludicrous, out of idiosyncratic conceptions of being and doing which out-fantasy fantasy; and it is tragic, when the barren result is predicted by reactive laws that can neither be shunted nor denied. Moreover, the more bizarre, while bedeviled, the dream stuff, the more certain is the chamois-skin criminologist that it should abide an action pattern in the brains of the crime-ridden. The idea may be that of an aesthete who is beyond suspicion of motive other than to serve his kind, yet be charged with the most malignant of anti-social germs. Take a case based cardinally on such an idea: as at present pressed, it is that it is the first duty of the State to so provide for the carefree recreation and amusement of recidivistic felons, as to win their unqualified approval of that provision. In other words, the correctional salve is bad medicine if it is not spread to the instinctive reactions of many-times convicted felons.