een erroneously or imperfectly
understood by those of his hearers who were diffident or insufficiently
prepared.

It is divided into three parts, criminal anthropology, mental
alienation, and the relation of serious offences (assault, murder,
poisoning, etc.) to legal medicine.

The first part contains a summing-up of the author's ideas on the
atavistic and pathological origin of the criminal. He examines the
equivalents of crime among plants, animals, savages, and children,
describes the pathological causes which call forth atavistic instincts
and alludes to other special kinds of degeneration peculiar to
criminals. Finally, the anatomy, functions, and internal organs of the
criminal are examined, and a careful study made of his intellectual
manifestations and psychology. Similar studies on epileptics and the
morally insane show that the three forms are only variations of the same
degeneration.

We have an examination of occasional, habitual, and latent criminals,
who represent an attenuated type of delinquency, following on the
investigations of these serious forms, admitting of correction,
prevention, or cure. It develops much later in life than the vicious
propensities of instinctive criminals or may even remain latent; yet at
the root we always find the same anatomical and pathological anomalies,
although less marked and fewer in number.

The origin of passionate and political criminals is entirely diverse.
Their criminality springs from an excess of noble passions, the
impetuosity of which prevents them from exercising sober judgment and
urges them to unpremeditated actions that afterwards cause them the
deepest remorse.

After a rapid survey of feminine criminality and its equivalent,
prostitution, the author discusses juridical and social methods of
curing crime.

In the second part, mental alienation in relation to legal medicine, the
author examines the anthropological and psychic characters of lunacy,
which he divides into various classes: congenital mental alienation
(cretinism, idiocy, imbecility, eccentricity); acquired mental
alienation (mania, melancholia, paranoia, circular insanity, dementia);
mental alienation in conjunction with neurosis (epilepsy, hysteria,
progressive general paralysis); alienation resulting from toxic
influences (alcoholism, including forms produced by indulgence in
absinthe and coca, saturnine encephalopathy, pellagra). An investigation
is made into the etiology of these