But what is this astuteness? It is an instinctive, innate faculty, which does not depend on real intelligence, and which is already found precociously perfected in children, in the lowest savages, in women, and also in imbeciles; although experience comes to its aid, it is never capable of artificial culture. It is essentially a faculty limited to the consideration of concrete cases, and which is chiefly concerned with the deception of others. The mental inertia so often combined with this faculty is recognised in this, that a criminal, in planning a crime, does not calculate all the possible eventualities, and immediately after the success of his action he loses all caution, as if the energy of his mind directed to the project and its execution was exhausted at one stroke. Beside this instinctive faculty, intelligence is a faculty of infinite variety, which matures slowly, and gradually affects language and questions of abstract culture. It needs to be cultivated with diligence, and with the help of a happy organisation of the nervous centres. It often develops late even in highly-gifted men.” At the same time men of undoubted intellectual power are sometimes found among criminals. Villon, one of the truest, if not one of the greatest of poets, was a criminal, a man perpetually in danger of the gallows; it does not seem to me, however, by any means clear that he was what we should call an instinctive criminal. Vidocq, a clever criminal who became an equally successful police official, and wrote his interesting and instructive _Memoirs_, may not have been, as Lombroso claims, a man of genius, but he was certainly a man of great ability. Eugene Aram is now generally recognised as a comparative philologist who foresaw and to some extent inaugurated some of the later advances of that science. [Illustration: PLATE X.]