st unsuccessful, unless it
is unsuccessful to wander from their own country over a great part of
the earth, in which case the English are unsuccessful too." A man with
a bumpy head may say to me (as a kind of New Year greeting), "Fools have
microcephalous skulls," or what not. To which I shall reply, "In order
to be certain of that, you must be a good judge both of the physical
and of the mental fact. It is not enough that you should know a
microcephalous skull when you see it. It is also necessary that you
should know a fool when you see him; and I have a suspicion that you
do not know a fool when you see him, even after the most lifelong and
intimate of all forms of acquaintanceship."

The trouble with most sociologists, criminologists, etc., is that while
their knowledge of their own details is exhaustive and subtle, their
knowledge of man and society, to which these are to be applied, is quite
exceptionally superficial and silly. They know everything about biology,
but almost nothing about life. Their ideas of history, for instance,
are simply cheap and uneducated. Thus some famous and foolish professor
measured the skull of Charlotte Corday to ascertain the criminal type;
he had not historical knowledge enough to know that if there is any
"criminal type," certainly Charlotte Corday had not got it. The skull, I
believe, afterwards turned out not to be Charlotte Corday's at all; but
that is another story. The point is that the poor old man was trying to
match Charlotte Corday's mind with her skull without knowing anything
whatever about her mind.

But I came yesterday upon a yet more crude and startling example.

In a popular magazine there is one of the usual articles about
criminology; about whether wicked men could be made good if their heads
were taken to pieces. As by far the wickedest men I know of are much too
rich and powerful ever to submit to the process, the speculation leaves
me cold. I always notice with pain, however, a curious absence of the
portraits of living millionaires from such galleries of awful examples;
most of the portraits in which we are called upon to remark the line
of the nose or the curve of the forehead appear to be the portraits of
ordinary sad men, who stole because they were hungry or killed because
they were in a rage. The physical peculiarity seems to vary infinitely;
sometimes it is the remarkable square head, sometimes it is the
unmistakable round head; sometimes the learned d