SUICIDE AND THE WEATHER. 605 



great thinkers have left on record their own emotional flights and de- 

 pressions under different meteorological conditions. But most of us 

 need to take no other word for the fact than our own. In all the vigor 

 of perfect health such influence may hardly be recognized, but when 

 the vital powers are depleted by the exhausting effects of a long nervous 

 or physical strain, then this phase of the cosmical environment is sure 

 to make itself felt. Then come the days when everything goes wrong. 

 The groundwork of forgotten quarrels is remembered, uneasy questions 

 arise with regard to the future; one gets tired of life. And how much 

 of all this can be attributed to an east wind or a leaden sky — in other 

 words, to weather effects? In order to answer this question we must de- 

 fine our use of the term 'weather effects.' From the standpoint of our 

 present study we should include within the category of weather effects 

 any marked inequality in the occurrence of suicide which may be found 

 to bear a fixed relation to the fluctuations of what we call weather. We 

 conclude that a fixed relation between a given weather state and an un- 

 usual prevalence of suicide is causal and not accidental. This is based 

 upon an inductive study of large numbers of data, and is as valid as such 

 studies can well be. 



The problem, then, consists in discovering these fixed relations. In 

 order to do this with exactness, the meteorologist's analysis of weather 

 must be taken. To him a given weather state is a complex and not a 

 simple phenomenon. He reads its temperature, its barometer, its hu- 

 midity, its wind velocity, its sunshine or shade, and its precipitation, and 

 it is only to the synthesis of these conditions that he applies the term 

 weather. For the purpose of our present study it is not enough to say 

 that the weather is fine, or disagreeable, or muggy, for those terms mean 

 one thing to one person and something very different to another, so it 

 has been necessary to make use of a definite meteorological nomencla- 

 ture which is recognized the world over. The study is in no sense an at- 

 tempt to account for suicide, but for the irregularity of its occurrence. 

 Man always has sought and perhaps always will seek self-destruction as 

 the relief for sorrow, fancied or real, and the basal reason for this is not 

 to be found in the weather. We would not argue that the weather 

 drives people to suicide save in very exceptional cases, but, on the 

 strength of what follows, that under some weather states other things 

 are peculiarly liable to drive people to the act. In other words, that 

 some meteorological conditions so affect the mental state, so influence 

 the emotional balance, that ordinarily endurable things become unen- 

 durable, and life seems no longer worth the living. 



This problem, which seems to show a causal nexus between the 

 weather and the mental state of the suicide, is a comparison of the oc- 

 currence of suicide under different meteorological conditions, with the 

 normal prevalence of those conditions, noting the excess or deficiency. 



