as they have brought to light two books on
the subject which concretely reflect, on the one hand, the dying out of
the old statistical method of studying the criminal, a method which will
never tell the whole story, and on the other hand, the birth of a new
kind of approach to the study of the criminal, namely--the
characterological approach. The study of crime or antisocial human
behavior from this newer standpoint at once becomes a study of
character, and demands a scientific consideration of the motives and
driving forces of human conduct, and since conduct is the resultant of
mental life, mental factors at once become for us the most important
phase of our study. Both of these books represent epoch-making
culminations of years of hard labor and scientific devotion to
criminology by two eminent students--Drs. Goring[1] and Healy.[2]

Dr. Goring's book, "The English Convict, a Statistical Study", appeared
in 1913, and is the result of an intense statistical study of 4000
English male convicts, to which the author devoted about twelve years of
his life. Dr. Healy's book, "The Individual Delinquent", which appeared
in the early part of this year, reflects the results of thoroughgoing
scientific studies of about 1000 repeated offenders, during the author's
five years' experience as Director of the Juvenile Psychopathic
Institute in connection with the Juvenile Court of Chicago. Numerous
reviews of these two books have appeared in medical and criminologic
literature, and we shall only touch very minutely upon the difference in
the methods of approach to the subject of these two authors as they
concern the subject under consideration in this paper. I can do this no
better than by quoting from a critical review of Goring's book by Dr.
White,[3] as it happily touches upon our very subject--namely, stealing.
"Take the more limited concept of 'thief', for example. One man may
steal under the influence of the prodromal stage of paresis who has been
previously of high moral character. Another man may steal under the
excitement of a hypomanic attack; another may steal as the result of
moral delinquency; another as the result of high grade mental defect;
another under the influence of alcoholic intoxication, and so forth, and
so on, and how by any possibility a grouping of these men together can
give us any light upon the general concept of 'thief' is beyond my power
to comprehend."

When one remembers that the 4000 units with w