Free The Psychological Solution by A. Hyatt Verrill Page B

the night when cars or taxis had not been in the street; but not one of these had attracted enough attention to cause the observers to note the license numbers, the body types, the colors or the makes of the cars.
    For a time the murder mystery filled the papers. A thousand and one theories and suggestions were advanced. A score of people identified the body, only to be proven wrong as the supposed victims were duly accounted for. Then the whole affair lost its news interest and the public forgot it.

CHAPTER II 
    Doctor Thane, Psychologist
    Although the press, the man about town, the subway perusers of the daily papers, and the public in general had forgotten the crime and its baffling mystery, two men were still deeply interested in solving it. One was the chief of detectives in whose district the body had been found; the other was Doctor Edmund Curtis Thane, the eminent scientist.
    Doctor Thane had, on more than one occasion, proved of invaluable aid to the police in unravelling mysteries of crime, and yet he was neither a criminologist nor, in the ordinary sense of the word, an amateur or scientific detective. He was by profession an anthropologist, and most of his waking hours were spent in his office on the fifth floor of the American Museum of Natural History, where he pored over scientific reports and studied fragments of the skeletons of long dead and forgotten human beings of strange races. He had traveled widely, especially in out-of-the-way regions and among primitive savages, and he had written numerous monographs on the results of his researches and studies. These had been undoubtedly of the greatest scientific interest and value, but were utterly unknown to the public at large; for that matter, neither was the Doctor himself.
    For years the short-sighted, quiet, pleasant-faced little scientist had been striving to solve the age-old puzzle—the origin of man and the relationship of races. He had attacked the problem from every angle, and having at last reached the conclusion that it was impossible of solution from accepted viewpoints, it had occurred to him that greater progress might be made from the psychological standpoint.
    From the very first his studies along this new line met with marked success. Men's bodies and bones, their lives and habits, their dialects and arts might be greatly influenced and altered through environment. But the mind, the psychology of the races, he theorized, would remain steadfast, and even if undergoing a change through external influences, would retain the ancestral characters and serve to connect the various races far more reliably than pigmentation of skin, dialects or other characteristics of the human race.
    Moreover, so Doctor Thane reasoned, it would be in the psychological reactions of the more primitive and ignorant types of mankind, that valuable discoveries would be made. So, following his hypothesis, Doctor Thane turned his attention to the mental workings of the criminal classes. It was his belief and contention that crime, as defined by law and civilized standards, was merely the result of a psychological condition, a reversion to the ancestral type, a manifestation of our prehistoric ancestors' mental processes. Scientifically speaking, it was not crime at all; it was natural, and the criminal was no more responsible for it, than he or she is responsible for the color of his or her hair or eyes or the form of the skull.
    Assuming that this were so—and of this Dr. Thane was firmly convinced—then the study of crime and the analysis of criminals' minds were the paths to follow in his studies. Hence the mild mannered, spectacled little man of science at once interested himself in matters usually left to the police. And as he was a man who never did anything by halves, he made as deep a study of crime as he had of skeletons and shards in the past. The more involved, inexplicable and unsolvable a crime, the more it fascinated him. Looking, as he did, upon