t-Ebing and writers of his school
are at present inclined to refer them all to diseases of the nervous
centres, inherited, congenital, excited by early habits of self-abuse.
The inadequacy of this method I have already attempted to set forth; and
I have also called attention to the fact that it does not sufficiently
account for phenomena known to us through history and through every-day
experience.

Presently we shall be introduced to a theory (that of Ulrichs) which is
based upon a somewhat grotesque and metaphysical conception of nature,
and which dispenses with the hypothesis of hereditary disease. I am not
sure whether this theory, unsound as it may seem to medical specialists,
does not square better with ascertained facts than that of inherited
disorder in the nervous centres.

However that may be, the physicians, as represented by Krafft-Ebing,
absolve all subjects of inverted sexuality from crime. They represent
them to us as the subjects of ancestral malady. And this alters their
position face to face with vulgar error, theological rancour, and the
stringent indifference of legislators. A strong claim has been advanced
for their treatment henceforth, not as delinquents, but as subjects of
congenital depravity in the brain centres, over which they have no
adequate control.

The fourth medical author, with whom we are about to be occupied,
includes sexual inversion in his general survey of human crime, and
connects it less with anomalies of the nervous centres than with
atavistic reversion to the state of nature and savagery. In the end, it
will be seen, he accepts a concordat with the hypothesis of "moral
insanity."

_Cesare Lombroso._ "_Der Verbrecher in Anthropologischer, Aerztlicher
und Juristischer Beziehung._"

This famous book, which has contributed no little to a revolution of
opinion regarding crime and its punishment in Italy, contains a
searching inquiry into the psychological nature, physical peculiarities,
habits, and previous history of criminals.[36] It is, in fact, a study
of the criminal temperament. Lombroso deals in the main, as is natural,
with murder, theft, rape, cruelty, and their allied species. But he
includes sexual inversion in the category of crimes, and regards the
abnormal appetites as signs of that morbid condition into which he
eventually revolves the criminal impulse.

Wishing to base his doctrine on a sound foundation, Lombroso begins with
what may be termed the embryolo