Abstract
IN the introduction to this fascinating book is suggested a special State department of criminal investigation. Police routine work, walking beats, directing traffic, quelling drunken street rows, is not, the author thinks, an effective school of deductive reasoning or scientific investigation. He would allow his investigators to enter the State service by another door; he would train them in applied science, and he would enable them to meet the clever criminal, as Sherlock Holmes loved to do, on the same intellectual plane. It would be unreasonable, however, to expect even from investigators so trained the same unerring instincts that surprise and delight us in the popular detective of fiction. The detective story is, we must remember, written backwards, and the author, having carefully laid his clues along the track of the crime, it is an easy matter for the detective, who is in the secret, to pick them up as he goes along.
Science and the Criminal.
By C. Ainsworth Mitchell. Pp. xiv + 240. (London: Sir Isaac Pitman and Sons, Ltd., 1911.) Price 6s. net.
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Science and the Criminal . Nature 87, 69–71 (1911). https://doi.org/10.1038/087069a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/087069a0
