The influence of _L’Uomo Delinquente_ in Italy, France, and Germany seems to have been as immediate and as decisive as that of _The Origin of Species_. Despine’s _Psychologie Naturelle_, the greatest work on the criminal that had appeared before Lombroso, was partial; the criminal was therein regarded purely as a psychological anomaly. Lombroso first perceived the criminal as, anatomically and physiologically, an organic anomaly. He set about weighing him and measuring him, according to the methods of anthropology. Even on the psychological side he gained new and more exact results. He went back to the origins of crime among plants and animals, among savages and children. He endeavoured to ascertain the place of the criminal in nature, his causes, and his treatment. Lombroso’s work is by no means free from faults. His style is abrupt; he is too impetuous, arriving too rapidly at conclusions, lacking in critical faculty and in balance. Thus he was led at the beginning to over-estimate the atavistic element in the criminal, and at a later date he has pressed too strongly the epileptic affinities of crime. His weaknesses have never been spared rough handling from friendly or unfriendly hands. Thus Mantegazza, while recognising his _ingegno potentemente apostolico e geniale_, denies that Lombroso possesses any of the qualities of a scientific investigator, and Dr. Napoleone Colajanni, who, from the socialistic left of the movement, has, in his _Sociologia Criminale_ (1889-90) and elsewhere, bestowed much elaborate and often valuable criticism on the centre, compares Lombroso’s indiscriminate collection of facts to Charles IX.’s famous order on St. Bartholomew’s eve: “Kill them all; God will know His own.” But his work has been so rich, so laborious, so various; it has opened up so many new lines of investigation, and has suggested so many more, that it has everywhere been received as marking a new epoch. He was, as he has himself expressed it, the pollen-conveying insect, and the new science which he fecundated has grown with extraordinary rapidity. A continuous stream of studies--from books of the most comprehensive character down to investigations into minute points of criminal anatomy or physiology--is constantly pouring forth. It is still impossible to gather up this mass of investigation, often necessarily discordant, into more than a tentative whole, but its existence is sufficient to prove the vitality of the new science. It has of course met with fierce antagonism, and Lombroso himself has declared that perhaps not one stone will remain upon another, but that if this is to be the fate of his work, a better edifice will arise in its place.