Note 5 — Chapter I · ANTECEDENTS—LOMBROSO’S PREDECESSORS IN RESEARCH

Together with Mantegazza, his colleague (as experimental pathologist) in Pavia from 1861 to 1866, Lombroso was the founder of anthropology in Italy. Of anthropology in the modern sense it is possible to speak only since, in the year 1859, Broca founded the Parisian Anthropological Society. Previously the term had denoted, as Kant’s “Anthropology” shows, empirical descriptive psychology. From the first the doctrine of the important varieties of human beings (insanity, cretinism, criminality, genius, degeneration) was for Lombroso a chapter of general anthropology. From the first also he regarded a knowledge of the environment as of the greatest importance for an understanding of the origin of these varieties (vide infra).