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Discovering Diverse Content Through
Random Scribd Documents
 the vast range of the ocean, during the ages of the earth's
existence…. We know from physical reasons that the earth was
once in a liquid state from excessive heat. Then there could have
been no living matter upon it. Now there is. Consequently non-
living matter has been turned into living matter somehow. We can
only get out of spontaneous generation by the supposition made
by Sir W. Thompson, in jest or earnest, that some piece of living
matter came to the earth from outside, perhaps with a meteorite.
I wish to treat all hypotheses with respect, and to have no
preferences which are not entirely founded on reason; and yet
whenever I contemplate this

simpler protoplasmic shape

Which came down in a fire-escape,

an internal monitor, of which I can give no rational account,

invariably whispers 'Fiddlesticks!'"

#Difficulties of Dr. Gould's position.#

Suppose, however, Dr. Gould's assumption were accepted,

suppose that life had come from without, matter were of itself
lifeless, and life, the "self-existent power," had ensouled some dead
organic substances so as to cause their organisation, would we be
any wiser through this hypothesis? The assumption instead of
diminishing the difficulties in the problem of life, would increase
them. New questions arise: What must this "self-existent power" be
conceived to be? Does it exist without a physical basis (to use
Professor Huxley's phrase)? How does it differ from energy? Is not
all power energy of some kind? And are not all kinds of energy
interconvertible? Has this self-existent power the faculty of changing
other energy into itself, into life, or is it only supposed to utilise it? In
the latter case it would be a Ding an sich, not in but behind the
functions of organisms; and in both cases it would form an exception
to the law of the conservation of energy, for "the self-existent power
of life" would be an ever-increasing power. One life-germ only may
have come from spheres unknown into the universe, and by utilising
the mechanical energy of the material world has animated at least
our earth, and may animate in a similar way all the globes in the
milky way. That life-germ, however,—if it was anything like a real
life-germ, such as our naturalists know of,—must have consisted of
organic substance. What a strange coincidence, that outside of the
world also organic substances are found! Life-germs are not simple
substance, but highly complex organisms. Accordingly, the question
presents itself, How has this life-germ been formed? What conditions
in another world radically different from ours have moulded it and
combined its parts into this special life-germ so extraordinarily
adaptable to our material universe? Or must we suppose that the
first life-germ was formed out of the cosmic substance of our
universe by a non-material spark of life, (whatever life may mean,)
that had dropped in somehow into the material world from without?

If life is a self-existent power, why does it always appear

dependent upon and vary with the organisation, which it is supposed
to have formed? Why has life never been observed in its self-
existence? So far as we have ever been able to observe life, it is
matter organised and organising more matter. All the difficulties
disappear if we say, Life does not produce organisation, it is
organisation.

*****

#Organisms nor aggregates of cells.#

 Dr. Gould, in appealing to the latest scientific researches as
proving "the dependence of all organisation upon life," especially
mentions his friend Dr. Edmund Montgomery and also Professor
Frommen's article "Zelle" (Eulenburg's "Realencyclopädie der
gesammten Heilkunde," 1890). Now it is true, as Dr. Gould says, that
"the body of animals is not an aggregate of cells." It is as little a
mere aggregate of cells as a watch is a mere aggregate of metal, or
as a hexagon a mere aggregate of lines. The body of animals is an
organism; which means, it is an interacting whole of a special form
built of irritable substance. A highly complex organism is not and
cannot be considered as a compound of its diverse organs, but as a
differentiation. Its unity is preserved in the differentiation, yet this
unity does not exist outside of or apart from the differentiated parts.

#Disparity of life and matter.#

I fully assent to Professor Huxley's proposition, approvingly quoted

by Dr. Gould, that "materialism is the most baseless of all dogmas." I
also believe in the omne vivum ex vivo; but I do not consider it with
Dr. Gould as an axiom, nor can I accept the consequence which Dr.
Gould derives from it, "that life [viz. organised life] is more certain
and enduring than matter, soul than sense." It is true that "matter
and life" are "as far apart as heaven and earth." Farther indeed, for
they are two abstractions of an entirely disparate character. No
passage through spatial distance, be it ever so large, could bring
both concepts together. They are and remain as different, as is for
instance the idea expressed in a sentence from the ink with which it
is written. Ideas contain no ink and ink contains no ideas. Yet this
does not prove that ideas exist by themselves in a ghostlike
abstractness apart not only from ink, but also from feeling brain-
substance. Nor does the disparity of the terms life and matter prove
the abstract or independent existence of life outside of matter.

If life for some such reasons as hold good only in so far as they
refute the old-style materialism, could or should be considered as
being some self-existent power having come into the world "to bite"
at matter, we might also consider the hexagon as a something that
came into the mathematical world from without. The hexagon
cannot be explained as a mere aggregate of lines, accordingly
hexagoneity must be a self-existent power; it must have come from
without, utilising lines for its hexagonic existence.

Organised life must have originated from non-organised elements

by organisation, and thus a new sphere is created which introduces
new conditions. The laws of organised life are not purely mechanical
laws, nor physical laws, nor chemical laws, but they are a peculiar
kind of laws; just as different as chemical laws are from purely
mechanical laws (the latter not including such phenomena as are
generally called chemical affinity).

#Natural laws and monism.#

Natural laws are formulas describing facts as they take place

under certain conditions. Accordingly if special conditions arise we
shall have a special set of laws. Monism assumes that all the laws of
nature agree among themselves; there is no contradiction among
them possible. Yet there may be an infinite variety of applications.
The processes of organised life are not mere mechanical processes.
The abstractions which we comprise under our mechanical terms do
not cover certain features of vital activity and cannot explain them.
Physiology is not merely applied physics; it is a province of natural
processes that has conditions of its own and the physiological
conditions are different from physical conditions. This however does
not overthrow monism. We believe none the less in the unity of all
natural laws and trust that if the constitution of the cosmos were
transparent in its minutest details to our inquiring mind, we should
see the same law operating in all the different provinces; we should
see in all instances a difference of conditions and consequent
thereupon a difference of results that can be formulated in different
natural laws, among which there is none contradictory to any other.

EDITOR.
LITERARY CORRESPONDENCE.

I.

FRENCH PUBLICATIONS.

Why do we sleep? Some have said, through cerebral congestion;

others, through cerebral anæmia. In reality the question remains
undecided. M. S. SERGUEYEFF has attempted to resolve it in his
scholarly lectures published under the title of Le Sommeil et le
Système nerveux, Physiologie de la Veille et du Sommeil.[86] He
considers it under a new and very general point of view.

[86] In two thick octavo volumes. Alcan, publisher.

According to him, wake and sleep would be the two alternating

phases of one and the same function, necessarily vegetative, and
absolutely indispensable to life. Sleep would respond to an
assimilation; wake to a dis-assimilation.

To this vegetative function, nevertheless, it is necessary to assign

an aliment, an organ, a mechanism. Now as yet we know of only
two material forms of assimilative activity, the one semi-liquid for
digestion, the other gaseous for respiration. The aliment of sleep
would be, as opposed to this, an ethereal matter, or, if we wish, a
dynamic form, susceptible of being accumulated and of being
transformed in various ways. At first sight, no doubt, it seems
difficult to accept a sthenic aliment, without a ponderable
substratum, and it sounds a little strange to seek in the phenomena
of wake and sleep "an assimilative group the object of which belongs
to the ambient dynamism," in other terms, "a functional activity,"
which should be influenced by the condition of the alimentary source
—that which would give at the same time the explication of the fact,
that, in a general way, the two phases of wake and sleep are related
to the planetary periodicity of day and night, summer and winter. Let
us, however, follow M. Sergueyeff in his interesting researches,
where the scientific spirit does not cease, at any rate, to sustain him.

In his theory the cerebro-spinal system is no longer the organ, as

it is in the theories of congestion and anæmia; but it is rather the
so-called sympathetic elements, the ganglio-epidermic system, of
which the imperfectly known functions rightly require to be
explained. Struck with the insufficient reasons given of the
phenomenon of caloricity resulting from the section of a sympathetic
nerve, or from the obstruction of a ganglion, M. Sergueyeff has been
led to assume an action of the great sympathetic, different from the
vaso-motor action. He does not hesitate, in order to explain the
caloricity, to admit into physiology the principle of the mechanical
equivalence of heat. He endeavors to prove, by an ingenious
argument, that the heat which is produced after the section of the
sympathetic nerves, finds its immediate origin in the arrest of a
nervous centripetal movement; that this arrested movement owes its
existence to dynamic condensations, to which certain organs of the
ganglionic system are adapted, being endowed with a condensatory
capacity; and finally that in the normal state the movement
represents, not an expenditure of energy, but a contribution, that is
to say, it is a movement of a trophical character.

The sanguineous condition of the brain remains to be considered;

but the difference in this respect between wake and sleep, would be
purely distributive instead of being quantitative. Schiff has remarked
that white rats deprived of their cerebral lobes and corpora striata
sleep and wake; which leads us to think that the phenomena of
cerebral irrigation are consequentials, and not essentials, of wake
and sleep. In short, these two alternating phases serve in turns as
chief moving causes for the vaso-motor excitation which differences,
in one or the other period, the sanguineous condition of this or that
medullar locality.

We cannot follow the author in the special study he makes, first of

the sensitive nerves and the motor nerves, then of the "cerebral
activities" in the conditions of wake and sleep. It would be laborious
to disengage his psychological doctrine from the long discussions
which envelop it, and which, well carried out as they may be, do not
always allow it to appear with as much distinctness as could be
wished. We will note only the care that he takes to restore the
psychic initiative, contrary to the theories most in favor to-day. He
supposes a prefunctional movement of the sensitive nerves, in order
to determine the sensorial impression; "attentive volitions" in order
to explain attention, voluntary or involuntary. According to him, the
physiological phenomenon which necessarily corresponds to
sufficient attention, that is to say to the laying hold of an object by
consciousness, can only be a volitional nervous movement. He
remains convinced that "the cells of the brain must project
incessantly in certain of their afferent fibres centrifugal influxes
which tend to meet with perceptive images"; and feeble and
involuntary as these influxes may be, he ranks them nevertheless in
the somewhat mysterious category of so-called attentive volitions.
These are not reflexes, but automatic movements. And definitively,
every act of attention belongs to the category of volitional
movement, be it involuntary or voluntary; or in short, "attentive
volition exists prior to its voluntary strengthening."

As to the revival of images, it is necessary to admit the

intervention of a previous tendency to association. The difficulty
remains then to know how we are to be able to keep these images
before the consciousness, in order to apply our attention to them,
and what secret cause has power to arouse the signals, the nervous
movements, which present them to it. The author resolves the
difficulty by accepting, for cases of intentional reviviscence, ideo-
motor volitions, to which he attributes a considerable rôle; their
intervention distinguishes precisely, says he, the active memory from
the passive memory.

In reality, for M. Sergueyeff the consciousness is not, as we have

said, a simple result of the image, an epiphenomenon; it is
permanent (thus he affirms that we always think, that we always
dream); the Ego, the We is for him an irreducible factor. This way of
looking at things has evidently influenced the choice of his
terminology, more than it has vitiated his analysis, and its
conclusions, moreover, he has not put down to the credit of any
system of metaphysics whatever. Far from having exhausted the
matter of his book, which is replete with criticisms and facts, I have
hardly sketched its outlines, and I should be his false interpreter if I
did not recall, in conclusion, the hope strongly expressed by himself,
that the great assimilative work of an imponderable aliment reserves
for us many other solutions beyond that of the phenomena of wake
and sleep. "Though it may be," says he to his hearers, "that in all
the recent words I have uttered, the truth shines only by a spark, do
not disdain this spark, gentlemen. May one of you receive it within
him, for it can, I have the confidence, by a more powerful breath
than mine suddenly increase, like a polar aurora, and illuminate
unbounded horizons."

*****

We now come to a book of less scope, rudely constructed

perhaps, but very instructive. As indicated by the title chosen by
him, La Psychologie de l'Idiot et de l'Imbècile,[87] Dr. PAUL SOLLIER
has attempted to draw the portrait of the idiot and the imbecile in
general; which I sincerely approve of persuaded as I am that we
shall find profit in sketching generic types and in tracing the
composite photographs of social individuals grouped in various ways,
in order to establish on solid basis a "natural history" of societies.
The novelists have approached this difficult enterprise at random; it
is for the psychologists to direct it with a method more sure and a
tact not less delicate.

[87] Alcan, publisher.

Idiocy is not always congenital; the lesions which produce it are

extremely varied and do not consist by any means in a simple arrest
of development. In short, idiots form a very diversified clinical group;
and here was the first difficulty necessary to overcome in order to
write their psychology. Profiting by the insufficient definitions that
authors have given of idiocy, M. Sollier thinks he is able in his turn to
define it as "a chronic cerebral affection with varied lesions,
characterised by troubles of the intellectual, sensitive, and motory
functions, going possibly as far as their almost complete abolition,
and which assumes its special character, particularly in what
concerns intellectual troubles, only in the youthful age of the
subjects it strikes." Then, discussing the proposed classification, he
stops to form three categories, which he connects with the
intellectual development, for which attention serves him as the
touch-stone. They are: (1) absolute idiocy—complete absence and
impossibility of attention; (2) simple idiocy—feebleness and difficulty
of attention; (3) imbecility—instability of attention. These differences
in the state of attention (we recognise the fruit of the excellent
teaching of M. Ribot) separate with sufficient clearness the imbecile
from the idiot: the latter remains extra-social, the former becomes
anti-social. M. Sollier, for whom the imbecile, let us say in passing, is
an exceedingly disagreeable personage, follows out throughout the
whole of his book this distinction, which seems to us one of the most
curious and the most piquant aspects of it. How many people in the
world border on imbecility, without belonging clinically to this type,
and maintain the mischievous rôle of destroyers and marplots!

Readers familiar with the study of mental maladies will not be

astonished to find among idiots the following signs of degeneracy:
dulled senses, obtuse perceptions, a poor condition of sensibility and
consequently of mobility, and anomalies or perversions of the
instincts, sentiments, etc. But that which makes of them a group
apart, is the constitution of the perfect type from infancy, while
among the degenerates properly so-called, the perversions, the
manias, etc. present, are the episodical concurrences of a morbid
evolution which unrolls itself capriciously in the course of a whole
life.

M. Sollier has interesting remarks nearly everywhere in his book.

We may refer, for example, to what he says concerning pity,
courage; of writing; of hereditary organic memory; of ideas, etc. It is
curious, certainly, to see idiots suddenly show themselves skilful in
playing an instrument which was that of their father and of their
grandfather. A passing observation on impressionability, greater for
color in girls and for form in boys, deserves to be developed: I regret
that the author should have been sparing of details on this point as
on some others. M. Sollier appears, we may say, to have aimed not
so much at giving new explanations in psychology, as at verifying
those which have been proposed by good authors. He is precise,
positive; from the medico-legal point of view, he presents practical
conclusions, and does not embarrass himself in sentimentalism, from
which the Philosophie pénale[88] of M. TARDE, let it be said
parenthetically, is not always sufficiently free.

[88] First volume of the Bibliothèque de Criminologie. Masson,

publisher.

A word more with reference to the "great suggestibility" of

imbeciles, on which M. Sollier reasonably insists. Since I spoke in
this place, three months ago, of the work of M. Bonjean, the
awkward intervention of M. Liégeois in the Eyraud-Gabrielle
Bompard case has contributed to compromise the Nancy school,
much more than to serve it. M. Brouardel is able to object with
ingenuity that certain persons, supposed to be victims of hypnotism,
unfortunately obey suggestions "which are the most agreeable to
them." It is good advice to be cautious. Still it is necessary to take
into account (it is what I had omitted to say) the character of the
subjects, in order to be able to judge of the possible accomplishment
of acts suggested in sleep. For, it is not doubtful that among the
abnormal, the imbecile, the mentally feeble, one could not count
much on the revolt of a moral personality which is not constituted,
on the efficiency of a power of inhibition which is almost null, and
that generally criminal suggestion can become formidable when it is
attended by bad instincts.

It remains to speak of a work by M. A. RICARDOU, De l'Idéal,

Etude philosophique.[89] I avow without any disguise that I have
not taken any interest in it. M. Ricardou declares himself a deist,
spiritualist; the misfortune is that he follows so much the vague and
wavering manner of his school. A fine rhetoric, elevated aspirations;
but few facts, not sufficient realities freely seen. What end is served
by rebelling against physiological psychology, and by laying claim to
the rights of the method of introspection? In truth, no one denies its
right; it is suspected only when it affects supremacy, and rejects all
control.

[89] Alcan, publisher.

I simply mention, in conclusion, the interesting work, which

appeared last year, of M. L. LEVY-BRUHL: L'Allemagne depuis
Leibniz, Essai sur le developpement de la conscience nationale en
Allemagne.[90] It belongs, in great part, to the history of philosophy,
and furnishes to it a valuable contribution.

[90] Hachette, publisher.

Paris, March, 1891. LUCIEN ARRÉAT.

II.

THE MODERN LITERATURE OF ITALY SINCE THE YEAR 1870.

 Not being a man of letters, but an alienist, I will give you a
psychological rather than a literary description of the condition of
literature in Italy. My presentation will undoubtedly have many
defects and deficiencies in details, but it will perhaps thereby gain in
originality of treatment.

It is one of the characteristics of European writers, and especially

of Italians, to isolate themselves completely from scientific research.
Beauty for itself, the imitation of the ancients—this is the defect, or
the strength, of our poets. ALEARDI, it is true, put some years ago a
little botany and geology into his poetry, as did, nearly a century
ago, Mascheroni, in his celebrated epistle Invito a Lesbia Sidonia.
ZANELLA, a true priest, has sung in a celebrated ode the Coquille
Fossile, which portrays in colors truly poetical the last discoveries of
paleontology. But this naturalism was only a light varnish, like the
golden powder that coquettes sprinkle on their hair, and which falls
at the first movement. It is nevertheless true that some poets, not
appreciated yet as they deserve, draw their inspiration from nature
or from history.

Such is ARTUR GRAF, who in my opinion owes his genius to an

intermixture of race, Italian, Greek, and German, and also to a
climatic graft, as he comes from Roumania; which shows the
favorable influence of the double race-infusion. (See my work on
"Genius.") In his poem Medusa, Graf has mingled naturalism and
Schopenhauerianism with a poetical spirit which is highly original. He
has also written Il Diabolo and the Legend of Rome among the
Nations of the Middle Ages; a work which has philological and
historical merit, especially in connection with the Folk-lore of past
centuries. These books are in prose; but their form is wholly
poetical.
 RAPISARDI is truly the Juvenal, and we may also say the
Lucretius, of contemporaneous Italy. He began by giving us the best
translation of the great Roman poet, and he has absorbed much of
his spirit, and perhaps also of the asperity of his verses, and of his
contempt for form. His great original poem is the Giobbe (Catania),
in which he has given a bitter satire of modern society and of
contemporary literary men; however, he would seem to be
sometimes too personal; so much so that many persons have not
forgiven him. Lately he has published a collection of Religious Poems
(Catania, 1888), in which, despite its title, there is much less religion
than naturalism. It is a hymn, worthy of its master, to the religion of
nature and to the beauty of truth, without forgetting the grand social
ideas of justice which our poets so often forget.

PRAGA may be described as the Baudelaire of Italy. He too, like

the latter, lived and died an alcoholist and paralytic. He was the first
to break with the Græco-Latin traditions; and has drawn his
inspiration from the caprices of his disease, which has given him a
powerful and original stamp. His best works are Penombre and
Tavolozza. The same lot, induced by the same disease, has befallen
ROVANI, who in his historical novels (Giulio Cesare and la Storia di
centi anni) has performed good work in history and psychology.

Among writers truly original, MANTEGAZZA excels in prose. His is

one of those many-sided, versatile minds that are met with in the
Latin races; such as Cardano, Leonardo da Vinci, L. B. Alberti,
Voltaire, Taine, Richet. He is by turns pathologist, physiologist,
chemist, anthropologist, geographer, traveller, and novelist. His novel
Dio Ignoto is semi-naturalistic. In his Fisiologia del piacere he has
attempted a new kind of personal observations, although it is met
with in the novels of Balzac, of Flaubert, and of Gonoret. In his
Physiology of pain he has again become pathological, serious; this
book has, accordingly, not obtained the success that it merited. In
the Feste ed Ebbrezze he describes the pleasures of the people. But
Mantegazza, who has the originality of genius, has also its evil and
treacherous volubility; and we cannot say what is his patriotic and
philosophic faith. He has written pages that seem dictated by a
catholic priest, by the side of others worthy of Aretino (Amore degli
uomini), and still other pages which could be signed by Victor Hugo.

Less original perhaps, but much more consistent with himself, is

M. TREZZA, another versatile writer, a theologist, poet, historian,
critic, philosopher, philologist, but who has not changed the facets of
his genius, or the conscience of his faith. At one time a priest, he
was one of the most ardent preachers; but the study of natural
science and of philosophy drew him away from his faith and plunged
him in naturalism. He has preserved all the apostolic warmth of the
ardent and honest priest of his youth. Thus he has emerged from it
a new being immovable in his faith:

"Come torre che non crolla

Giammai la cima per soffiar dei venti."[91]

[91]
Like a tower that shakes not
In the blasts of the storm.

His works in religious criticism La Religione e le Religioni, and also

in history and philosophy (Lucrezio, Epicuro e l'Epicurismo, La Critica
Moderna) have received from it a peculiar impress, in which the
enthusiasm of the apostle is mingled with the calm observation of
science, and history confounds metaphysics. He is the first and the
only one perhaps, who has attempted criticism in Italy while
preserving a literary brilliancy which reminds us of Carlyle.

But according to universal opinion, among all these stars, the star
of first magnitude is GIOSUE CARDUCCI. He is the true
representative of the Italians, a graft of antiquity on the moderns,
but in which antiquity predominates. His poems (Le Nuove Poesie,
Le Odi barbare, Le Nuove Odi barbare, Le Terze Odi barbare, Le
Nuove Rime) have attracted the greatest attention. He has
introduced and revived a new metre, many times tried, but never
with success, by Trissino, Campanella, Chiabrera, and others; a new
metre which reproduces the ancient rhythm of Greek and Roman
poetry, especially the elegy and the Alcaic ode. His is a new pagan
Renaissance with a certain gloss of modernness but with outbursts
sometimes patriotic and even revolutionary which the Renaissance
lacked. His prose works also consist of archaic reconstructions of
Italian literary history and of vigorous polemics, sometimes too
personal, but always with a refinement of critique.

By the side of these productions which are known everywhere,

and which can be truly called national, there is a substratum, of
considerable extent, of literary works that have a local character.
Such is the poetry of dialect which has however a great weight with
us; for the best satirical poems and the best comedies are almost
always written in dialect (Pascarella in the Roman dialect, Fucini in
the Tuscan dialect, Di Giacomo in Neapolitan, Bersezio in
Piedmontese, Rizzotto in Sicilian). It must be remarked also that this
local division is still maintained in the rolls of the great army of
literature, although this does not prevent such works passing beyond
the geographical limits of their territory and becoming known
throughout the whole of Italy.
 We have a Ligurian-Piedmontese school with DE AMICIS at the
head,—De Amicis, who now however often attempts social studies
with much intrepidity,—and BARILI, FARINA, BERSEZIO, GIACOSA,
and FALDELLA, who possess the common characteristic of a
sentimentality almost feminine, altogether opposed to the rugged
country of which they constitute the glory.

There is the Tuscan-Bolognese school of which CARDUUI is the

chief pontiff and which hovers about the old school. M. PANZACCHI,
RICCI, MARRADI, and STECCHETTI belong to it; there was an epoch
in the life of the last named in which he launched into a style which
seemed naturalistic, but which was at bottom only pornographic; but
he immediately compensated for his escapade by a great number of
philological memoirs of an erudition truly oppressive, ultra-
academical.

There is the Abruzzian school, of which D'ANNUNZIO is the head.

Its characteristics are variegated tropical coloring, and a certain
studied ornamentation sometimes burdened with similes and
metaphors, and an exaggerated objectivity; it lays hold of the
outside of things, but does not reach to and grasp the soul of the
inner life of nature.

The Neapolitan school is made up of compilers and ingenious

critics, who will make you an elegant embroidery with gossamer
threads on the point of a needle. The most celebrated names of this
school are SETTEMBRINI, DESANCTIS, BONGHI, and VITTORIO
IMBRIANI.

The Sicilian is the rudest, but it is the most powerful and most
original. We could name the great historians CEMARI, LA LUMIA,
LAFARINA; and PITTRE, who created Italian Folklore, and who has
maintained it with a special journal. Sicily has also given us two
great novelists, VERGA and CAPUANA, who are improved Zolas. The
Malavoglia and Don Gesualdo of M. Verga give us the home life of
the Sicilian people. In the Giacinta of Capuana we have the life of
the citizens and of the Italian nobility photographed.

Women always preserve the local type; but with special features.
Hardly any write in verse; they compose novels and light productions
rather than romances, sketches rather than true portraits. They
choose the young girl and the unfortunate married woman; very
often they write autobiographies, or the biography of their friends or
their husbands. The land-question has nevertheless been dealt with
very well by the Marchioness COLOMBI, (pseudonym of Madame
Torelli Viollet) and the woman's question has been treated of with
great vigor and statistically by KULISCHIOFF; I have not spoken of
ANNIE VIVANTI, another proof of the advantages of crossing, for
she is Anglo-American and Anglo-Italian, and a Jewess to boot; she
writes in verses which have nothing of the classical element in them
—an extraordinary thing in Italy. Her works possess originality, which
goes as far as the most extreme naturalism. (Lirica di Annie Vivanti,
1890.)

In fine, modern Italy has not many literary masterpieces to show.

And this is due to a number of causes. In romances and comedies,
dash and spirit demand a certain stock of observations that can be
found only in great cities (capitals), and in Italy, Rome and Milan are
only beginning to be such.

Originality, multiplicity, and energy of types are very scarce in

Italy, for everywhere the conventional lie dominates; it is much more
difficult to choose models here than it is in certain other countries,
for example in Russia; for genius alone can draw inspiration from
inferior and ordinary material.

The classical system of education has prevented us from going to

the source of social anomalies, mattoids, madmen, etc.

Besides, classicism, which has dominated us for so many

centuries, and which has inspired us with its marvellous beauties,
has, like the old, (and it is very old,) lost all its vital force. People
have made believe to warm themselves by it; but they have not
succeeded; they remain cold; and they admire its adepts only in
deference to the conventional lie. Yet the entire education of our
youth consists of that. It is the same as in religion. People have
made Madonnas and Jesuses of it to such an extent that now there
is no longer any means of contriving anything new. Naturalism
without being the natural foundation of the people is nevertheless
sufficiently advanced not to allow of serious inspiration in religion.

Many authors who have sought new paths have been led out of
their way by journalism and politics, which always end in exhausting
people, even geniuses. SCARFOGLIO, BONGHI, TORELLI, DEZERBI,
and FERRI are among the number.

The difficulty of securing a place in the literary world also very

quickly exhausts many. Thus many men, especially of Southern Italy,
produce a very good work; but they have become fathers too late in
life, and have only a single son; such are BERSEZIO, with his Travet,
BOITO with his Ballate, VALCARENGHI with his Confessioni d'Andrea.

Political liberty, if it has given an impulse to social and political

studies, has prejudiced great literary production, perhaps because
under the incitement of foreign domination and of rebellion, the
heart draws from a grand source of inspiration, and the pen finds
powerful excitation, more powerful perhaps, than liberty gives it.

Art finds more numerous elements of success in minds highly

excited. It is the property of great revolutions to elevate the souls of
all contemporaries, to impart to them a peculiar disposition unknown
before, and which is not slow to disappear. The most humble, the
most obscure, those even who have not taken any part in the events
and who have hardly studied them, express, a long time afterwards
even, sentiments much superior to those which their ordinary
condition allows. It is sufficient to have lived during some passionate
epoch to issue from it better, purer, and stronger. The new ideas, the
generous impulses which then carry away nations, penetrate into all
classes and ennoble a whole generation. We had in our revolutionary
epoch, Manzoni, Massimo d'Azeglio, Guerazzi, Giusti, Porta, Miceli,
Brofferio, Berchet, Mameli, Boerio, Laquacci, Aleardi, Grassi, Prati.
Who have we now to compare with them?

Turin, March, 1891. CESARE LOMBROSO.

BOOK REVIEWS.

THE ORIGIN OF THE ARYANS. An Account of the Prehistoric

Ethnology and
Civilisation of Europe. By Isaac Taylor, M. A., L. L. D. New
York: Scribner & Welford.

The author of this extremely interesting work states in the preface

that it does not aim at setting forth new views or speculations. His
opinions on its main thesis, that is, as to the place of origin of the
primitive Aryans, are those of Spiegel and Schrader, except where he
prefers the conclusions of Cuno. These writers, with the majority of
the latest investigators of the subject, accept the view originated[92]
by the English philologist Dr. R. G. Latham in 1851, that the original
home of the primitive Aryans was on the great plain of Central
Europe. Cuno insisted also on what Dr. Taylor affirms is now an
axiom in ethnology, that race is not coextensive with language. This
is a most important principle, as it completely changes the aspects
of the problem by making it more complex. It introduces, in fact, a
fresh element; as it requires the Aryan to be identified before his
primitive habitat can be sought for.
 [92] Dr. Daniel G. Brinton in his Races and Peoples points out
that the view referred to in the text was first stated by the Belgian
naturalist M. D'Halloy; but it has always been accredited to Dr.
Latham by German writers and, as mentioned by Dr. Taylor, was
regarded by them as an English "fad."

The difficulties attending this identification are clearly pointed out

in the present work. During the neolithic period, Europe was
inhabited by four distinct races, all of which are represented among
the present Aryan-speaking peoples of the continent. If the primitive
Aryans are to be identified with one of those races it must have
imposed its speech on the other three. Moreover, of those four
races, two are decidedly dolichocephalic, or long-headed, the other
two being as decidedly brachycephalic, or broad-headed. The latter
are now represented by the Slavo-Celtic, and the Ligurian, or Swiss
and Savoyard, peoples; while the present representatives of one
primitive long-headed race are the Swedes, the North Germans and
the Friesians, and of the other, the Corsicans, the Spanish Basques,
and some of the Welsh and Irish. There are grounds for believing,
however, that the two dolichocephalic races were derived from a
single root, and that the two brachycephalic races will ultimately be
identified as one. There would thus be left only two primitive stocks,
one long-headed and the other short-headed, and Dr. Taylor
concludes, not only that the primitive Aryans belonged to the latter,
but that they were racially connected with the Finno-Ugric tribes of
Eastern Europe and Central Asia. He shows that the culture of the
Slavo-Celtic race, as exhibited in the round barrows of Britain and
the pile-dwellings of Central Europe, comes nearest to that of the
primitive Aryans, as disclosed by linguistic palæontology. Further,
that anthropologically this belongs to the same type as that of the
tall, fair, broad-headed Finno-Ugrian tribes; agreeably to which, the
grammatical resemblances between the Aryan languages and those
of the Ural-Altaic stock point to a primitive unity of speech.

There would seem to be no doubt that the greater part of Europe

was originally occupied by peoples of the long-headed type, and Dr.
Taylor conjectures "that at the close of the reindeer age a Finnic
people appeared in Western Europe, whose speech remaining
stationary, is represented by the agglutinative Basque, and that
much later, at the beginning of the pastoral age, when the ox had
been tamed, a taller and more powerful Finno-Ugrian people
developed in Central Europe the inflective Aryan speech." This
theory requires that the non-Aryan long-headed race should have
acquired in some way the Aryan speech, and it is not surprising that
the North Germans reject the "Turanian" theory accepted by the
French and espoused by our author, and maintain that the physical
type of the primitive Aryans was that of their own tall, fair,
dolichocephalous race. On this view, the ancestors of the
brachycephalic Lithuanians, whose language best represents among
those of Europe the primitive Aryan speech, must have been
Aryanised by the ancestors of the Teutons, whose language
approaches nearest to the Lithuanian. Dr. Taylor points out, however,
that this would leave unexplained "how the speech of the
brachycephalic Celts and Umbrians, to say nothing of the Greeks, the
Armenians, and the Indo-Iranians, was obtained from that of the
dolichocephalic Teutons; how a people which in neolithic times was
few in numbers, and in a low state of culture, succeeded in
Aryanising so many tribes more numerous and more civilised."

The question arises as to how far this "Aryanising" process

extended. Was it limited to language or did it include certain physical
characters as well? As a fact the superficial characters of the tall
dolichocephalic type which, according to Nilsson and Von Düben, has
prevailed in Sweden continuously from the earliest times to the
present day, make an approach to the florid complexion, light eyes,
and reddish hair of the tall brachycephalic race. The former have
lighter hair, a whiter skin, and eyes of blue instead of gray, but these
are just the differences that might be expected, as the result of the
admixture of the Slavo-Celtic stock with that to which the famous
Neanderthal skull belongs, and which is now known as the Canstadt
type. At the same time it is possible that the difference in color as
well as in stature which distinguishes the tall from the short races
belonging to both the long-headed and the broad-headed stocks
may be the result of external influences, such as climate, food, and
clothing, and the general conditions of life in a mountainous or
northern region. This would apply at all events to the Teutonic or
Scandinavian type, and also to the Celto-Slavic which represents the
primitive Aryan type, or rather their Ugro-Finnic predecessors, if it is
true, as Dr. Schrader concludes, that the undivided Aryans had only
two seasons, winter and spring, or at most three. This fact does not
necessarily imply that they lived in a northern region; for the same
climatic conditions could be met with in a mountainous district. Dr.
Schrader thinks, however, that the precise region can be
approximately indicated by reference to the beech tree. We are told
that this tree does not now grow east of a line drawn from
Königsberg to the Crimea, and its northern limit must formerly have
been still more restricted. Hence the cradle of the Latin, Hellenic,
and Teutonic races, which have the same name for this tree, must
have been to the west of the ancient beech-line. But since the Slavo-
Lithuanian name is a Teutonic loan-word, we must place the cradle
of the Lithuanians and the Slaves to the east of this line. But since
there are philological reasons for believing in the unbroken
geographical continuity of the European Aryans previous to the
linguistic separation, they must be placed in northern Europe astride
of the beech line; the Slavo-Lithuanian in European Russia; and the
Celts, Latins, Hellenes, and Teutons farther to the West. It may be
doubted, however, whether this necessarily indicates northern
Europe as the primitive Aryan home. Dr. Latham in his "Native Races
of the Russian Empire" insisted on Podolia being the region where
Sanskrit and Zend developed themselves, the Slavo-Lithuanic region
lying to the north and west of it. Curiously enough the beech-line
passes directly through Podolia, which might therefore claim to be
the classic Aryan abode. Too much stress should not be laid,
however, on such an incident as the occurrence of a particular name
for a tree. It is quite possible that the beech may not have been
known to the brachycephalic Aryans until after they came in contact
with the dolichocephalic Teutons. This would seem, indeed, to be
required if the Ugro-Finnic origin of the Aryans is well founded. At
the same time it should be pointed out that while, according to Keith
Johnston's "Physical Atlas," the region of deciduous trees extends as
far east as the Aral Sea, Latham refers the beech to the Caucasus as
its special habitat; and the mountain slopes of the Caucasus are
shown by Peschel to be the best fitted geographically for the original
home of the Indo-European race.

After all the question of the place of origin of the primitive Aryans
is not so important as that of their race affinities, on which, indeed,
the former question ultimately depends, and Dr. Taylor has done well
to follow up what he terms the "pregnant suggestion" of Dr.
Thurnam, the joint author with Dr. J. Barnard Davis of their great
work "Crania Britannica," as to the identification of the primitive
Aryans with the "Turanian" race of the British round barrows. That
he has conclusively established this point it would be rash to affirm,
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