That the criminal virus is widely disseminated is proved by its unfailing reappearance in all times and places. Crimes of the same sort have been and are being continually committed, with no greater difference than is due to surroundings, opportunities, individual idiosyncrasies, the changing circumstances that accompany the varying conditions of life. I propose to show now from a number of selected cases how thieves, swindlers, depredators, murderers, and all kinds and classes of criminals who make mankind their prey, have been reproduced again and again. Both men and women have been found acting under the same baleful impulse, showing greater or less ingenuity, but working on the same lines. The sharper follows out his long career of successful fraud and imposture century after century. Such men as Hatfield, Collet, Coster, Sheridan, Benson, Shinburn, Allmeyer, are the seemingly inevitable recurrence of one and the same type. Jenny Diver and the German Princess have had their later manifestations in Mrs. Gordon Baillie, La "Comtesse," Sandor, and Bertha Heyman. Cain has innumerable descendants; nothing stops the murderer when the savage instinct is in the ascendant; he feels no remorse when the deed is done. I shall presently give a short account of one or two of those miscreants who might otherwise escape classification, and whose very names are synonymous with great crimes--Troppmann, Bichel, Dumollard, De Tourville, and Peace. But this section may very well begin with some account of a few famous swindlers. HATFIELD. One of the earliest swindlers in modern records was John Hatfield, a youth of low origin, who was yet so gifted by nature, had such mother wit and such a persuasive tongue, that he succeeded in passing himself off as a man of rank and fortune without detection or punishment for a long series of years. He was born of poor parents in Cheshire, in 1769, and on reaching manhood became the commercial traveller of a linen-draper, working the north of England. On one of his rounds he met with a young lady, a distant connection of the ducal house of Rutland, who had a small fortune of her own, and, using his honeyed tongue, [Illustration: _Photo: W. H. Grove, Brompton Road, S.W._ CONVICTS AT WORK IN THE DARTMOOR QUARRIES.]