SUICIDE. 131 



of various kinds. These feelings include, for instance, 

 simple annoyance or disappointment ; with regret or re- 

 morse ; despair of forgiveness by man a despair, moreover, 

 that may be utterly groundless and needless ; what is called 

 'broken heart,' from whatever cause arising; disgust and 

 jealousy. Sometimes, as in man, the causes or motives are, 

 or at least appear to us to be, of a very trivial and dispro- 

 portionate kind. Thus suicide has occurred in the monkey 

 simply on account of correction for faults, just as happens 

 occasionally in the sensitive human child. Frequently the 

 animal has been a pet or favourite of some master or mis- 

 tress, who has turned it adrift when age and infirmity have 

 overtaken it, and have rendered it no longer companionable. 

 The various kinds or degrees of wounded feeling that may 

 prompt to so serious a step as suicide are mentioned in the 

 chapters on ' Sensitiveness ' and on the f Moral causes of 

 mental defect and derangement.' 



3. The animal may suffer rather from physical than 

 mental agony ; it has met with some serious accident, or is 

 the subject of some bodily disease, attended with acute pain, 

 and this pain perhaps has been prolonged, and is no longer 

 endurable ; or without what amounts to agony, there may 

 be the misery begotten of long-continued and gradually in-' 

 creasing ill-health a misery that in man produces a kind of 

 conjointly physical and mental discomfort of an utterly in- 

 definable kind, that too frequently becomes intolerable, and 

 demands its quietus ; or it may be simply blind, deaf, or 

 paralysed. 



4. There may be conjoint bodily and mental suffering as 

 in the case of beasts of burden, that are, in spite of their 

 protests, habitually overloaded by relentless, injudicious, 

 inconsiderate man. Here there are not only physical fatigue 

 and all the evils to health begotten of it, but also the sense 

 of injustice, of cruelty, of unrewarded or badly rewarded 

 effort. 



5. The animal is perhaps at bay ; or from other causes it 

 is in a state of desperation, surrounded by enemies or dan- 

 gers threatening immediate death of a torturing kind, rrorn 

 which enemies or dangers escape seems hopeless. 



K 2 



