igns as worse than doubtful, except a certain
deformation of one part of the body, which may possibly be taken as the
proof of habitual prostitution, when it occurs in quite young persons.
Of course they admit that wounds, violent abrasions of the skin, in
certain places, and some syphilitic affections strongly favour the
presumption of a criminal act. Finally, after insisting on the
insecurity of Tardieu's alleged signs, and pointing out the
responsibility assumed by physicians who base a judgment on them, the
two Germans sum up their conclusions in the following words (p. 178):
"It is extremely remarkable that while Tardieu mentions 206 cases, and
communicates a select list of 19, which appear to him to exhibit these
peculiar conformations of the organs, he can only produce one single
instance where the formation seemed indubitable. Let anyone peruse his
19 cases, and he will be horrified at the unhesitating condemnations
pronounced by Tardieu." The two notes of exclamation which close this
sentence in the original are fully justified. It is indeed horrifying to
think that a person, implicated in some foul accusation, may have his
doom fixed by a doctrinaire like Tardieu. Antipathy and ignorance in
judges and the public, combined with erroneous canons of evidence in the
expert, cannot fail to lead in such cases to some serious miscarriage of
justice.

Passing from the problem of diagnosis and the polemic against Tardieu,
it must be remarked that Casper was the first writer of this class to
lay down the distinction between inborn and acquired perversion of the
sexual instinct. The law does not recognise this distinction. If a
criminal act be proved, the psychological condition of the agent is
legally indifferent--unless it can be shown that he was clearly mad and
irresponsible, in which case he may be consigned to a lunatic asylum
instead of a jail. But Casper and Liman, having studied the question of
sexual maladies in general, and given due weight to the works of
Ulrichs, call attention to the broad differences which exist between
persons in whom abnormal appetites are innate and those in whom they are
acquired. Their companion sketches of the two types deserve to be
translated and presented in a somewhat condensed form.[17]

"In the majority of persons who are subject to this vice, it is
congenital; or at any rate the sexual inclination can be followed back
into the years of childhood, like a kind of physical herma