296 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



of this by contrasting love as presented in the sexes. As there is no 

 process of vivisection or array of physical facts which will prove this, 

 we must study this emotion as we know it to exist in the mass of men 

 and women, and which has been verified by common experience. But, 

 in the first place, we must bear in mind the widely-diverging paths in 

 life followed by men and women. Men enter the world and labor 

 bodily or mentally, and thus expend all surplus energy. This energy 

 is used at the direct expense of the emotional life. Women, as a rule, 

 do not have this vicarious outlet for the emotions. Love with women 

 exists as an entity, with men as an abstraction. A study of tables of 

 suicidal deaths in both sexes gives us some startling evidence of the 

 difference in both the intensity and effect of this emotion in men and 

 women. The decade between twenty-five and thirty-five years of age 

 affords the largest number of voluntary deaths for women. It is dur- 

 ing this period of woman's life that the demand for love is greatest. 

 The functional life is exerting its most potent sway over mind and body. 

 Thus it is that to love and to be loved is a physiological demand 

 during this period, and it becomes evident that this excess of suicides 

 is the outcome partly of a defeated sexual life. The figures for men 

 present a remarkable contrast. The same period in the life of men is 

 also the period of greatest sexual activity. But, whatever vicissitudes 

 the emotion of love among men may be subjected to, it does not find 

 expression in self-destruction. On the contrary, the period of greatest 

 liability to suicides is postponed to the period when the sexual ener- 

 gies have expended their youthful ardor, so that the decade between 

 thirty-five and forty-five years of age gives the greatest number of 

 suicidal deaths, and during which interval it is that the business or 

 worldly interest of men attains success, or ends in failure. 



Another fact derived from the same source throws light on this in- 

 teresting subject. The condition of concubinage almost trebles the 

 number of voluntary deaths for women. It seems reasonable, from 

 what we know of human beings, to assert that it is not the continu- 

 ance, but the breaking up of these relations which, in a monogamous 

 state of society, must invariably occur that leads to this result. We 

 have here almost positive proof that this tendency to self-destruction 

 in the relation of women to the other sex finds its factor in a defeated 

 sexual feeling or love. It is generally understood that the mental and 

 bodily structure and function of women develop at an earlier age than 

 in the other sex. Now, there are twice as many suicides among girls 

 as among boys under the fifteenth year. A leading character of the 

 earlier development of women over the other sex is a sexual one a 

 capacity to love and to be loved. It is a very significant fact in com- 

 paring the degree and quality of love as we find it existing in men and 

 women, that the two periods in woman's life in which suicidal deaths 

 exceed those in the male are at the time of structural completion and 

 greatest functional activity. This demonstrates the predominance of 



