It has been the misfortune of this great and truly scientific investigator to give origin to an empiric art of phrenology which took the place of the old art of physiognomy he had done so much to destroy. He has consequently, until recent years, been popularly known chiefly by his mistakes, especially perhaps by his localisation of the sexual instinct in the cerebellum--a localisation, however, which he supported by a large body of evidence. The influence of dubious phrenological doctrines hardened into a system somewhat impairs the value of Lauvergne’s _Les Forçats_ (1841), which seems to have been the first book of any importance devoted entirely to the study of convict nature, physical, moral, and intellectual. Lauvergne, who was the chief medical officer to the hospital for convicts at Toulon, appears to have been a man of humanitarian instincts, whose wit and _bonhomie_ enabled him to maintain friendly relations with the criminals he was studying; he had little capacity for scientific analysis, but he wrote fully of what he had seen and known, and his book contains many keen observations which have been since verified. He fully recognises also the importance of the social factor in the production of criminals. Lauvergne had observed how many of his subjects were insane or diseased; the students of the criminal who followed him all insisted on the pathological element. Dally maintained that the criminal and the lunatic are identical, and both equally irresponsible. Prosper Lucas, in his valuable _Traité philosophique de l’hérédite_ (1847), showed how deeply rooted in the organism are the morbid tendencies of crime. Lélut compared the length and breadth of head in criminals. Voisin noted their defects in cerebral organisation. It was, however, Morel who, in his _Des Dégénérescences_ (1857), chiefly developed this aspect of criminality, and his influence is still strong among French students of the criminal. Morel regarded crime as one of the forms taken on by degeneration in the individual or the family; and degeneration he defined as “a morbid deviation from the normal type of humanity.” The causes of degeneration which he recognised were intoxications, famines, social environment, industries, unhealthy occupations, poverty, heredity, pathological transformations, moral causes. “My principal aim,” he says, “has been the study of these causes, and of the influences which they exercise, firstly on the constitution of individuals, and afterwards on that of their descendants.” Among these causes he gives a chief place to the manifold effects on the children of alcoholism in the parents. In his pamphlet _De la Formation du Type dans les variétés dégénérés_ (1864), Morel proposed to give the name of morbid anthropology to “that part of the natural science of man, the aim of which is to study the characters due to certain special diseased influences, as well as to hereditary transmissions of bad nature.”