the suicide rates that they have inherited, with
their character, from their European ancestors. The Germans who came
here forty or fifty years ago brought a high suicide rate with them, and
their descendants maintain it. The Irish, on the contrary, brought a low
suicide rate to this country, and their children have it still. In the
following table will be found the suicide rates of a few nationalities
in Europe and of their descendants in the United States.[22]

SUICIDES PER MILLION OF POPULATION

NATIONALITIES IN EUROPE IN THE U. S.

Native Americans 68
Hungarians 114 118
Germans 213 193
French 228 220
English 100 104

In an address delivered before the Anthropological Society of
Washington, D. C., on October 19, 1880, Mr. M. B. W. Hough said: "As
long as the features of the ancestor are repeated in his descendants, so
long will the traits of his character reappear. Language may change,
customs be left behind, races may migrate from place to place and
subsist on whatever the country they occupy affords; but their
fundamental characteristics will survive, because they are comparatively
uninfluenced by the mere accidents of nutrition." This statement is as
true of suicide as it is of other manifestations of national character.

_Odd Methods Employed by Suicides_

Nothing is more surprising in the records of suicide than the
extraordinary variety and novelty of the methods to which man has
resorted in his efforts to escape from the sufferings and misfortunes of
life. One would naturally suppose that a person who had made up his mind
to commit suicide would do so in the easiest, most convenient, and least
painful way; but the literature of the subject proves conclusively that
hundreds of suicides, every year, take their lives in the most
difficult, agonizing, and extraordinary ways; and that there is hardly a
possible or conceivable method of self-destruction that has not been
tried. When I clipped from a newspaper my first case of self-cremation
with kerosene and a match, I regarded it as rather a remarkable and
unusual method of taking life; but I soon discovered that self-cremation
is comparatively common. When I learned that Mary Reinhardt, of New
York, had sung "Rock of Ages" and had then killed herself by inhaling
gas in a barrel stuffed with pillows, I thought it a curious and
noteworthy c