cine Mentale
Belgique_, March, 1901). In France, Lacassagne has summated the
data extending over more than 40 years, and finds that for all
crimes June is the maximum month, the minimum being reached in
November. He also gives the figures for each class of crime
separately, and every crime is found to have its own yearly
curve. Poisonings show a chief maximum in May, with slow fall and
a minor climax in December; assassinations have a February and a
November climax. Parricides culminate in May-June, and in October
(Lacassagne's tables are given by Laurent, _Les Habitues des
Prisons de Paris_, Ch. 1).

Notwithstanding the general tendency for crime to reach its
maximum in the first hot month (a tendency not necessarily due to
the direct influence of heat), we also find, when we consider the
statistics of crime generally (including sexual crime), that
there is another tendency for minor climaxes in spring and
autumn. Thus, in Italy, Penta, taking the statistics of nearly
four thousand crimes (murder, highway robbery, and sexual
offences), found the maximum in the first summer months, but
there were also minor climaxes in spring and in August and
September (Penta, _Rivista Mensile di Psichiatria_, 1899). In
nearly all Europe (as is shown by a diagram given by Lombroso and
Laschi, at the end of the first volume of _Le Crime Politique_),
while the chief climaxes occur about July, there is, in most
countries, a distinct tendency to spring (usually about March)
and autumn (September and November) climaxes, though they rarely
rise as high as the July climax.

If we consider the separate periodicity of sexual offences, we
find that they follow the rule for crimes generally, and usually
show a chief maximum in early summer. Aschaffenburg finds that
the annual periodicity of the sexual impulse appears more
strongly marked the more abnormal its manifestations, which he
places in the following order of increasing periodicity:
conceptions in marriage, conceptions out of marriage, offences
against decency, rape, assaults on children (_Centralblatt fuer
Nervenheilkunde_, January, 1903). In France, rapes and offences
against modesty are most numerous in May, June, and July, as
Villerme, Lacassagne, and others have shown. Villerme,
investigating 1,000 such cases, found a gradual ascent