n, rather than to the climate,
of that region. This phase of the subject need not be discussed at
length, because all competent authorities agree that climate, in its
relation to suicide, is not a controlling or determining factor.

A very different state of affairs appears, however, when we bring the
suicide rate into correlation with season and weather. Long ago, before
accurate statistics made a scientific investigation of the subject
possible, there was a widely prevalent popular belief that dark and
dismal months of the year, and gloomy, rainy, or uncomfortable weather,
predisposed mankind to self-destruction, and that the suicide rate was
highest in November or December, and lowest in spring or early summer.

_Spring and Summer the Suicide Seasons_

The French philosopher Montesquieu went so far as to explain the
supposed frequency of suicide in London by connecting it with English
rains and fogs. It was only natural, he argued, that unhappy people
should kill themselves in a country where the autumnal and winter months
were so dark, and where there was so much gloomy, depressing weather.
When, however, investigators began to study the subject in the light of
accurate statistics, when they grouped suicides by months and compared
one month with another, they were surprised to find that the tendency to
suicide was greatest, not in the gloomy and depressing months of
November and December, but in the bright and cheerful month of June. In
1898 Dr. Oscar Geck, of Strasburg, published statistics of about 100,000
suicides that took place in Prussia in the twenty-year period between
1876 and 1896. They showed that, so far at least as Prussia was
concerned, suicides invariably attained their maximum in June and their
minimum in December. There was a constant rise in the suicide curve from
January to the end of June, and a constant decline from June to the end
of the first winter month.

Durkheim, of Paris, and Dr. Gubski, of St. Petersburg, who are among the
most recent investigators of the subject, assert that, so far as the
seasonal distribution of suicides is concerned, the figures for Prussia
hold good throughout Europe. June is everywhere the suicide month, and
December is everywhere the month in which self-destruction is least
frequent. Durkheim gives tabulated statistics for seven of the principal
countries of Europe, which show conclusively that, in point of
predisposing tendency to suicide, the four seasons s