In his opening discourse Dr. Brouardel remarked that the Italian school had the great merit of taking up again the study of a question with which philosophy, law, and medicine have always been occupied. Every time in the history of a country that philosophic studies have free expansion, the desire to safeguard society, the spirit of toleration, the methods for ameliorating the fate of the guilty, of protecting them from themselves, and of taking them out of the environment which educates them to crime, have been the object of the meditation and study of great thinkers; and their conceptions have eventually conquered public opinion. It has been the honour of the Italian school--in the land where Roman law, the foundation of all law, was born--that it has again put into the crucible this problem of criminality, and that it has proceeded to the analysis of that problem by the only truly scientific method--by studying the psychology of criminals, and their pathological abnormalities. It will be its distinction to have declared against illusory enthusiasms, and to have founded a science which will contribute to the more efficacious protection of society. The first communication came from Lombroso, as the recognised chief of the Italian school. He summarised what he believed to be the most important abnormal physical characteristics found among criminals--the presence of cranial and facial asymmetry, precocious synostosis, unusual frequency of left-handedness, large orbits, prominence of zygoma, large median occipital fossa, frequency of tattooing, etc. These characters, he considered, were all due to pathological causes. The discussion was at once commenced by M. Manouvrier. He began by declaring that he was by no means an antagonist of the Italian school. He granted that it had been proved that physical abnormalities are more common among criminals than among the ordinary population, but he claimed due consideration for the influence of environment; crime is a sociological matter much more than a physiological matter. M. Dimitri Drill said that, strictly speaking, there is no criminal type; there are, as Morel had shown, organic conditions of defect and degeneration, but criminality remained above all a social question. MM. Pugliese and Garofalo expressed very similar opinions. M. Lacassagne pointed out that we too often forget the factor of misery in the production of crime; he meant not merely social misery, but physiological misery, of which the origin was intra-uterine. As regards poverty, M. Garofalo could not share Lacassagne’s views; his investigations had shown that the number of criminals furnished by the middle classes is, proportionately, quite equal to that furnished by the lower classes, while for some kinds of crime the upper classes gave a higher figure than the lower. Mme. Clémence Royer called attention to the importance of hybridism in the genesis of crime. The recrudescences of