OMETER 245

Fig. 35. ALGOMETER 248

Fig. 36. CAMPIMETER OF LANDOLT (MODIFIED) 248

Fig. 37. DIAGRAM SHOWING NORMAL VISION 250

Fig. 38. DYNAMOMETER 253

Fig. 39. HEAD OF AN ITALIAN CRIMINAL 254

INTRODUCTION

BY CESARE LOMBROSO

[Professor Lombroso was able before his death to give his personal
attention to the volume prepared by his daughter and collaborator,
Gina Lombroso Ferrero (wife of the distinguished historian), in
which is presented a summary of the conclusions reached in the
great treatise by Lombroso on the causes of criminality and the
treatment of criminals. The preparation of the introduction to this
volume was the last literary work which the distinguished author
found it possible to complete during his final illness.]

It will, perhaps, be of interest to American readers of this book, in
which the ideas of the Modern Penal School, set forth in my work,
_Criminal Man_, have been so pithily summed up by my daughter, to learn
how the first outlines of this science arose in my mind and gradually
took shape in a definite work--how, that is, combated by some, the
object of almost fanatical adherence on the part of others, especially
in America, where tradition has little hold, the Modern Penal School
came into being.

On consulting my memory and the documents relating to my studies on this
subject, I find that its two fundamental ideas--that, for instance,
which claims as an essential point the study not of crime in the
abstract, but of the criminal himself, in order adequately to deal with
the evil effects of his wrong-doing, and that which classifies the
congenital criminal as an anomaly, partly pathological and partly
atavistic, a revival of the primitive savage--did not suggest themselves
to me instantaneously under the spell of a single deep impression, but
were the offspring of a series of impressions. The slow and almost
unconscious association of these first vague ideas resulted in a new
system which, influenced by its origin, has preserved in all its
subsequent developments the traces of doubt and indecision, the marks of
the travail which attended its birth.

The first idea came to me in 1864, when, as an army doctor, I beguiled
my ample leis