102 MARRIAGE AND DISEASE. 



himself. What hidden disposition of the organs, what 

 sympathy, what combination of physical laws caused 

 the father and his two children to perish by their own 

 hands, by the same method, and at the same age ? " * 



Falret gives the case of a family in which the grand- 

 mother, mother, and grandchildren were the subjects 

 of suicidal melancholia, and records the history of 

 another family thus: The father was of a taciturn 

 disposition ; he had six children, five boys and a girl. 

 The eldest, aged forty, precipitated himself from the 

 third storey, without any motive ; the second in age 

 strangled himself at thirty-five ; the third threw him- 

 self from a window in attempting to fly; the fourth 

 shot himself with a pistol ; and, lastly, a cousin jumped 

 into a river from a trifling cause.f Scores of such 

 cases might be quoted; they are familiar to every 

 asylum physician. But I need not load these pages 

 with such melancholy records, enough has been already 

 given to make clear to the reader with what fatal 

 certainty this tendency towards self-destruction is 

 handed down from parent to child. There is one 

 other point, however, upon which I would like to say 

 a word, and that is, suicide amongst children. Fifty 

 years ago suicide of children of tender years, which 

 has of late become so painfully common, was almost 

 unknown. Some put this down to an earlier develop- 

 ment of the mental powers in consequence of forced 

 education, that is to say, the period of reasoning 



* " Dictionnaire Philosophique." 

 t Bucknill Tuke's "Psychological Medicine." 



