Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 58.djvu/617

absolutely free from rainfall or snowfall, and those on which there was either, without considering the amount.

The figure referred to discloses some unexpected facts—namely, that the clear, dry days show the greatest number of suicides, and the wet, partly cloudy days—the gloomiest of all weather—the least, and with differences too great to be attributed to accident or chance; in fact, thirty-one per cent, more on dry than on wet days, and twenty-one per cent, more on clear days than partly cloudy. As will be seen, on cloudy days the occurrence was about normal. What does this mean? Must fiction resign her right to ring in gloomy weather and blinding storms as a partial excuse for ending an existence made more unendurable by these? If such be the case, it is well that Dickens and Lytton and Poe are gone, for they would be robbed of a large number of their tragic climaxes. England has long been characterized as 'gloomy Britain,' and Montesquieu has called it the 'classic land of suicide,' stating that the 'excessive number of suicides for that country is due to its gloomy weather.' Statistics have shown, however, that the number is not excessive there, being less per million inhabitants than for any other important European nation. An interesting paper, appearing in the British magazine Once a Week (vol. xix.) over no signature (though the writer was evidently not a Scotchman), has a bearing upon the subject. It says:

"The idea that the prevalence of suicide in this country (England) is due to our bad weather is precisely one of those hasty and illogical inferences which are characteristic of the Gallic mind. The constant gloom of bad weather ought to acquaint us so thoroughly with moods of depression that suicide would never occur to us. Look at Scotland, for instance, where suicides are rare. Why are they rare? Simply because a succession of Scotch Sundays has so accustomed the people to prolonged despondency that any sudden misfortune can not sink their spirits any further. One has only to spend a dozen Sundays in Glasgow or Edinburgh to become inoculated against suicide. So far from London fogs driving people to jump off Waterloo Bridge, they ought to train the mind to bear any calamity. A man who has taught himself to eat prodigious quantities of opium feels scarcely any effect from other forms of intoxication. We can educate our mental susceptibilities as we can our muscles, and the more we educate them the more they are able to bear."

There are many truths beneath the jocular vein of this quotation, and the writer expressed more facts than perhaps he knew.

Certainly a comparison of suicides for Denver and New York City supports his theory, for in the former city, where cloudy and partly cloudy days are less than one-third as frequent as in the latter, we find suicide excessive during the gloomy weather. Yet the conditions there, both social and climatic, are so unusual as to give this fact little weight in a comprehensive study of suicides, and we must maintain that Vilemais's dictum that 'nine-tenths of the suicides occur in rainy or cloudy