hereditary in all the members of his family. It flashed across my
mind that many criminal characteristics not attributable to atavism,
such as facial asymmetry, cerebral sclerosis, impulsiveness,
instantaneousness, the periodicity of criminal acts, the desire of evil
for evil's sake, were morbid characteristics common to epilepsy, mingled
with others due to atavism.

Thus were traced the first clinical outlines of my work which had
hitherto been entirely anthropological. The clinical outlines confirmed
the anthropological contours, and _vice versa_; for the greatest
criminals showed themselves to be epileptics, and, on the other hand,
epileptics manifested the same anomalies as criminals. Finally, it was
shown that epilepsy frequently reproduced atavistic characteristics,
including even those common to lower animals.

That synthesis which mighty geniuses have often succeeded in creating by
one inspiration (but at the risk of errors, for a genius is only human
and in many cases more fallacious than his fellow-men) was deduced by
me gradually from various sources--the study of the normal individual,
the lunatic, the criminal, the savage, and finally the child. Thus, by
reducing the penal problem to its simplest expression, its solution was
rendered easier, just as the study of embryology has in a great measure
solved the apparently strange and mysterious riddle of teratology.

But these attempts would have been sterile, had not a solid phalanx of
jurists, Russian, German, Hungarian, Italian, and American, fertilised
the germ by correcting hasty and one-sided conclusions, suggesting
opportune reforms and applications, and, most important of all, applying
my ideas on the offender to his individual and social prophylaxis and
cure.

Enrico Ferri was the first to perceive that the congenital epileptoid
criminal did not form a single species, and that if this class was
irretrievably doomed to perdition, crime in others was only a brief
spell of insanity, determined by circumstances, passion, or illness. He
established new types--the occasional criminal and the criminal by
passion,--and transformed the basis of the penal code by asking if it
were more just to make laws obey facts instead of altering facts to suit
the laws, solely in order to avoid troubling the placidity of those who
refused to consider this new element in the scientific field. Therefore,
putting aside those abstract formulae for which high talents have pant