But it is not only medical science which claims this preponderating _rôle_. If the Lombrosian School erred in asserting the predominant influence of what was called the 'physio-psychical' conditions of crime: if the right to punish man be based not on the character of the crime, but on the constitution of the criminal, the doctor would usurp the function of the judge, and the bankruptcy of the old penal system would be complete. It was in protest against this extravagant assertion of the claims of medical and mental science (medico-légale expertise) that a succession of Congresses was held on the Continent in the latter part of the last century (_Congrès International d'anthropologie et sociologie_), at the last of which--the Congress of Geneva, 1896--the English Government was represented. The general result of the discussions that took place was to reject the Lombrosian idea of the physical or constitutional causes of crime, and to assert the importance of '_milieu_' (nurture and environment) as the predisposing factor in anti-social conduct,--in the words of Dr. Lacassagne, Professor of Legal Medicine at Lyon--words which sum up tersely the familiar view that crime is entirely the result of social conditions, '_le milieu social est le bouillon de culture de la criminalité, le microbe c'est le criminel_.' The relative part played by inherited propensity and social environment remains to-day the leading subject of controversy with those interested in the philosophical aspect of crime. England has contributed its share to this controversy in the remarkable work of Dr. Goring "The Study of the English Convict," of which I have given a brief account in the Chapter "A Criminological Inquiry in English Prisons." His early death has robbed penal science of a brilliant and earnest votary; but his work will always remain as the first attempt to analyze the causes of crime by strictly scientific method. An abridged edition of his work has lately been published, with an Introduction by Professor Karl Pearson, under whose auspices and guidance it was compiled at the Biometric Laboratory of the London University. An Introduction by Professor Pearson not only marks the great scientific value of this attempt to probe the causes of crime, but gives a just and merited appreciation of a singular effort by a very remarkable man to test the observations and experience that came to him as a Medical Officer of Prisons by the latest methods of scientific investigation.