Criminal Anthropology in Italy. born in 1856, in the neighborhood of Man tua, a city whose very name in Austrian days was synonymous with cruel despotism, for this and Spielburg were the favorite fortresses of the German persecutors. At a tender age he lost his father, and his mother, left in straitened circumstances, had a hard struggle to give her only child an adequate education. Already at the univer sity Ferri distinguished himself, publishing a thesis which dealt with criminal law. When Lombroso published his great work on " Criminal Man," Ferri was at once attracted by its scientific nature and sought to become ac quainted with its author. Since then they have been fast friends as well as co workers. In 188 1 he was called to fill the chair of penal law at the Univer sity of Bologna. His opening discourse dealt with the theme which was to prove the first draft of his great work, "Crimi nal Sociology," a work which has been transla ted into many European tongues. The lecture was entitled " New Horizons in Penal Law." He says! Enrico "It was in this inaugural discourse that I affirmed the existence of the positivist school of criminal law, and assigned to it these two fundamental rules : 1 . While the classical schools of criminal law have always studied the crime and neglected the criminal, the object of the positivist school was, in the first place, to study the criminal, so that, instead of the crime being regarded merely as a juridical fact, it must be studied with the aid of biology, of psychology, and of criminal statistics as a natural and social fact, transforming the old criminal law into a criminal sociology. 2. While the classical
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schools, since Beccaria and Howard, have fulfilled the historic mission of decreasing the punishments, as the reaction from the severity of the mediaeval laws, the object of the positivist school is to decrease the of fenses by investigating their natural and so cial causes in order to apply social remedies more efficacious and more humane than the penal counteraction, always slow in its effects, especially in its cellular system, which I have called one of the aberrations of the nine teenth century." Ferri has occupied him self less with the instinc tive than with the occa sional criminal, and his clear and philosophical spirit has placed him at the head of criminal soci ologists. Elected to Par liament even before the age of thirty, previous to which he could not take his place, according to Italian law, he began an ^W avowed liberal, but soon passed over to the ranks of scientific socialists, whose acknowledged leader he has since be come. He also holds the post of professor of penal law at the Roman Univer Feuri. sity. But his home is on the vine and olive-clad shores of Etruscan Ficsole, within a short walk of Florence. Of his great work on "Homicide" we have treated at length in these pages. Though in some points he has grown to differ from him, Ferri continues to venerate his master Lombroso, and with rare eloquence defends his theories from attacks at moments when the less eloquent scientist seems si lenced by the arguments of his adversaries. It was due to his energy, conjoined to the initiative of Lombroso, that the first Inter national Congress of Criminal Anthropolo
