Nothing is more surprising in the records of suicide than the extraordinary variety and novelty of the methods to which man has resorted in his efforts to escape from the sufferings and misfortunes of life. One would naturally suppose that a person who had made up his mind to commit suicide would do so in the easiest, most convenient, and least painful way; but the literature of the subject proves conclusively that hundreds of suicides, every year, take their lives in the most difficult, agonizing, and extraordinary ways; and that there is hardly a possible or conceivable method of self-destruction that has not been tried. When I clipped from a newspaper my first case of self-cremation with kerosene and a match, I regarded it as rather a remarkable and unusual method of taking life; but I soon discovered that self-cremation is comparatively common. When I learned that Mary Reinhardt, of New York, had sung "Rock of Ages" and had then killed herself by inhaling gas in a barrel stuffed with pillows, I thought it a curious and noteworthy case; but when I compared it with suicides that came to my knowledge later, it seemed quite simple and natural. I have well-authenticated cases in which men or women have committed suicide by hanging themselves, or taking poison, in the tops of high trees; by throwing themselves upon swiftly revolving circular saws; by exploding dynamite in their mouths; by thrusting red-hot pokers down their throats; by hugging red-hot stoves; by stripping themselves naked and allowing themselves to freeze to death on winter snow-drifts out of doors, or on piles of ice in refrigerator-cars; by lacerating their throats on barbed-wire fences; by drowning themselves head downward in barrels; by suffocating themselves head downward in chimneys; by diving into white-hot coke-ovens; by throwing themselves into craters of volcanoes; by shooting themselves with ingenious combinations of a rifle with a sewing-machine; by strangling themselves with their hair; by swallowing poisonous spiders; by piercing their hearts with corkscrews and darning-needles; by cutting their throats with hand-saws and sheep-shears; by hanging themselves with grape vines; by swallowing strips of under-clothing and buckles of suspenders; by forcing teams of horses to tear their heads off; by drowning themselves in vats of soft soap; by plunging into retorts of molten glass; by jumping into slaughter-house tanks of blood; by decapitation with home-made guillotines; and by self-crucifixion. Of course, persons who resort to such methods as these are, in most cases, mentally unsound. A man who shoots, hangs, poisons, or drowns himself may be sane; but the man who crucifies himself, buries himself alive, cuts his throat on a barbed-wire fence, or climbs into the top of a tree to take poison, is evidently on the border-line of insanity, even if he be not a recognized lunatic.