662 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Despine, who has bestowed profound study on this subject, shows, 

 from a very large number of instances, that when a crime surrounded 

 with dramatic circumstances is published abroad, and made matter of 

 general comment, a certain number of similar crimes will be committed 

 soon afterward. Minds that are not fortified, by a strict morality and 

 a good education, against the allurements of such examples, and 

 whose slumbering passions only await the occasion that will stir them 

 up, are spurred on and decided to act by the bustle and the parade 

 made about the hero of a criminal trial. M. Despine's statistics on 

 this painful subject are exceedingly curious and conclusive. ~Now it 

 is some peculiar form of murder, again a new process of poisoning, 

 anon, some original way of disposing of a corpse, that gives occasion 

 to grim plagiarisms with all the circumstances identical. In a word, 

 all criminal acts proceeding from hate, revenge, and cupidity, always 

 summon forth in certain individuals a spirit of emulation. Hence it 

 were advisable absolutely to forbid the publication, in popular prints, 

 of criminal trials whether real or imaginary, and to interdict the per- 

 formance of plays wherein wickedness and crime are portrayed for 

 the gratification of the spectator's morbid curiosity. M. Despine's 

 suggestion with regard to this matter w r ill be approved by physicians 

 and hygienists, who are all agreed that writings and plays of a cer- 

 tain class are to be reckoned among the causes which conduct so many 

 wretches to the galleys, the morgue, and the mad-house. When we 

 disseminate examples of outrage and disorder, we must not be surprised 

 if we find a harvest of crime and insanity. Let us then heartily sec- 

 ond the suggestion we speak of, and which M. Bouchut authoritative- 

 ly formulates when he says that, instead of feasting the public with 

 recitals and plays so dangerous to the commonweal, we should rather 

 found a moral pest-house to which should be committed, so soon as 

 they make their appearance, those rascalities whose contagiousness is 

 now beyond question. 



Besides the contagion of those passions which end in crime, there 

 is also the contagion of those passionate states which terminate in 

 suicide. Epidemics of suicide are frequent in history. The instance 

 of the young women of Miletus, as told by Plutarch, is familiar. One 

 of them hung herself, and immediately several of her companions 

 made away with themselves in the same manner. To stay the prog- 

 ress of this redoubtable frenzy, the order was given to expose the 

 naked bodies of the suicides in the market-place of the city. An an- 

 cient historian of Marseilles records an epidemic of suicide w 7 hich 

 raged among the young women of that place. In 1793 the city of 

 Versailles alone offered the spectacle of 1,300 voluntary deaths. In 

 the beginning of the present century a suicidal epidemic destroyed 

 large numbers of people in England, France, and Germany, the vic- 

 tims being young persons who had conceived a disgust for life, from 

 the reading of melancholy romances, coupled with precocious over-in- 



