The case is held over while the scientist makes his investigation. After careful inquiry, he reports that the young man's criminal record began at the age of nine, when he was arrested for stealing bananas from a freight car. Locked up with older criminals, he soon learned their tricks. He was "nimble" and could "handle himself," so his prison mates taught him the science of pocket picking, and initiated him into the gentle art of "shop lifting." He was released, after two months of this schooling, and slipping out into the big, black city, he tried an experiment. Succeeding, he tried again, and yet again. Before the month was out, he was detected stealing a silk handkerchief, and was back in prison. There his education was perfected, and he entered the world to try once more. From the world to jail, from jail to the world--this boy's life history from the age of nine, had been one long attempt to learn his trade; fortunately or unfortunately, he was somewhat of a bungler, and sooner or later he was always caught. When he was a boy, he sneaked up a dingy court, and three pairs of dirty stairs to a landing where, in the rear of a battered tenement, was an abode which he had been taught to call home. His father, a dock laborer, earned, on the average, about $300 a year. Sometimes he worked steadily, day and night, for a week, and earned $25 or $30; then there would be no work for ten days or perhaps two weeks; the money would run out; the grocer would refuse credit; and the family would be hungry. It was during one of these hungry intervals that the nine-year-old urchin made his descent on the bananas in the freight car, and received his first jail sentence. His mother, good hearted but woefully ignorant, made the best of things, taking in washing, doing odd jobs here and there, tending to her children, when opportunity offered, and at other times letting them run the streets. "There," concludes the social scientist, "is the story of that boy's life. His only picture of manhood is an inefficient father who cannot earn enough to support his family; his concept of a mother expresses itself in good hearted ignorance; his view of society has been secured from the rear of a shabby tenement, the curb of a narrow street and a cell in the county jail. The seed bed has been neither prepared, watered, nor tended, and the young shoot has grown wild."