ly a very minute proportion are either criminal
or psychopathic in temperament or organization (_Archiv fuer
Kriminal-Anthropologie_, vol. xi, 1902). It is not clear,
however, that Baumgarten carried out any detailed and precise
investigations. Mr. Lane, a London police magistrate, has stated
as the result of his own observation, that prostitution is "at
once a symptom and outcome of the same deteriorated physique and
decadent moral fibre which determine the manufacture of male
tramps, petty thieves, and professional beggars, of whom the
prostitute is in general the female analogue" (_Ethnological
Journal_, April, 1905, p. 41). This estimate is doubtless correct
as regards a considerable proportion of the women, often
enfeebled by drink, who pass through the police courts, but it
could scarcely be applied without qualification to prostitutes
generally.

Morasso (_Archivio di Psichiatria_, 1896, fasc. I) has protested
against a purely degenerative view of prostitutes on the strength
of his own observations. There is, he states, a category of
prostitutes, unknown to scientific inquirers, which he calls that
of the _prostitute di alto bordo_. Among these the signs of
degeneration, physical or moral, are not to be found in greater
number than among women who do not belong to prostitution. They
reveal all sorts of characters, some of them showing great
refinement, and are chiefly marked off by the possession of an
unusual degree of sexual appetite. Even among the more degraded
group of the _bassa prostituzione_, he asserts, we find a
predominance of sexual, as well as professional, characters,
rather than the signs of degeneration. It is sufficient to quote
one more testimony, as set down many years ago by a woman of high
intelligence and character, Mrs. Craik, the novelist: "The women
who fall are by no means the worst of their station," she wrote.
"I have heard it affirmed by more than one lady--by one in
particular whose experience was as large as her benevolence--that
many of them are of the very best, refined, intelligent,
truthful, and affectionate. 'I don't know how it is,' she would
say, 'whether their very superiority makes them dissatisfied with
their own rank--such brutes or clowns as laboring men often
are!--so that they fall easier victims to the rank above them; or