Careful investigations would doubtless furnish additional examples of this comical application of the _argumentum ad hominem_ in refutation of the notion that intellectual capacity is determined by the bulk of the brain or the shape of the skull. Ugo Foscolo, one of the most celebrated of modern Italian poets, had a cranium, which, according to this standard of appreciation, ought to have belonged to an idiot. On the other hand, the brain of the “Hottentot Venus,” examined by Gratiolet, far surpassed in the symmetry of both hemispheres and the perfection of its circumvolutions the normal brains of the Caucasian race. The same phenomenon has been observed, although in a less striking manner, occasionally in cretins and quite often in criminals. Character is the resultant of a multitude of combined forces, the great majority of which are still unknown and perhaps unknowable quantities. The impulse given by each must be exactly estimated in order to predetermine the joint effect. No factor which contributes to its formation must be overlooked, and the acceptance of any one of them, however important it may seem to be, as the basis on which to reform and reconstruct our penal legislation, would be premature and pernicious. This hobby-horsical tendency, which is the vice of every specialist, is now the besetting sin of criminal anthropologists, each of whom is firmly convinced that he can reach the goal only on his own garran. “The more advanced criminalists,” says Professor Von Kirchenheim, “are becoming thoroughly convinced that the penal codes of to-day do not correspond to the criminal world of to-day. No science has remained so deeply rooted and grounded in scholasticism as jurisprudence; and this evil is most clearly perceptible in the province of criminal law. The necessity of a change in our penal legislation has already made itself widely felt. The contest with crime must now be carried on in a different manner from what it was when men waged war with bows and arrows; modern criminality must be fought, as it were, with repeating rifles.” In other words, we can never suppress crime by meeting it with bludgeons and boomerangs and other rude implements of barbarous warfare, but must encounter it with the finest and most effective weapons of precision, which the armoury of modern science can put into our hands. Society has outgrown the crude conception of punishment as mere retaliation or retribution incited by revenge. There is no doubt that even in the most enlightened countries, penology as a science is still in its infancy, and is only just beginning to feel the uncomfortable girding of its scanty swaddling-bands and blindly kicking itself free from them. That this first emancipatory effort should be somewhat clumsy, and occasionally attended by comical casualties and even serious disasters, lies in the very nature of the case. It is evident, too, that the antiquated and utterly