104 MARRIAGE AND DISEASE. 



noted for the persistency with which it clings to a 

 family, often appearing at about the same age genera- 

 tion after generation, and even the same delusions as 

 of ultimate condemnation, impending poverty, and the 

 like appearing again and again. When a person 

 falls into melancholia it is usually set down to ill- 

 health, or to over-work, to real business trouble or 

 domestic affliction. Doubtless in some few cases this^ 

 may be true, but in all cases hereditary taint should 

 be suspected and searched for, for no form of insanity 

 is so frequently attributable to this cause, except 

 only the tendency to suicide, and the drink-crave. As 

 Esquirol says : " Melancholiacs are born with a pecu- 

 liar temperament, which disposes them to melancholy." 

 This regularly transmitted melancholia which appears 

 in youth and middle life may, or may not, be accom- 

 panied by a tendency to suicide. In some melancholiacs 

 the impulse to self-destruction is ever present, in 

 others it only appears with periodic exacerbations 

 of depression, while in another and still more painful 

 class the unholy fear of horrors to be experienced 

 in the next world makes the sufferer cling to his 

 wretched life with the tenacity of despair. Doubtless 

 many of those cases in which suicide appears in 

 succeeding generations might be pub down to inherited 

 melancholia with suicidal tendency, for it is almost 

 impossible to distinguish those cases in which mental 

 depression and weariness of life precede and lead up 

 to the act of self-destruction from those in which 

 the blind impulse to leave the world exists alone. 



