On Marshes, Salt Marshes, and lands low lying and liable to floods, the ratio is much less, as in Holland and on the Landes in France. But we shall, I think, be justified in considering that it is not the river that has caused the suicides, nor the marsh that has made them few; the truth no doubt is that the marsh has rendered the people few, and simple in habit, whilst rivers, the oldest means of locomotion, invited settlers, and settlers made town after town, and then a city on each river, and multitudes grew, and as some few became wealthy, the millions became permanently in want. Montesquieu, with whom suicide was a favourite study, called England the “Land of Suicide,” from its fogs and damp, dark, cold climate, but he was wrong; even at that time France had a heavier voluntary death-rate. Over and above which our suicides cluster in preference round our summer months, and not our foggy ones, to which fall our heaviest ordinary death-rates. CHAPTER X. EDUCATION, RELIGION, AND MORALS. Quite closely connected with the consideration of these influences, are others partly dependent on them, the manners and customs of a population, the extent of civilisation, and education, and their religious and moral state. The manners and customs are to a great extent peculiar to each race, while the members of each race are all apt to take on an amount of civilisation by means of education, which varies in a quite indefinite manner. No amount of argument or inquiry seems, however, to invalidate the statement that a preponderant rate of suicide, and a high rate of madness exist in countries the farthest advanced in our modern ideas of civilization, and in education, and in modern modes of thought. The intensely complicated state of modern society lays ambushes for us of myriads of dangers, difficulties, annoyances, illnesses, and worries, which to the denizen of a savage country are entirely unknown. That the influence of modern education is to increase the suicide-rate is proved by statistics of many sorts; from tables of the percentage amongst those “able to read and write,” and the reverse; from the conscription tables of France and Italy, and from the fact that those countries which possess the higher standard of general culture, furnish the largest contingent of voluntary deaths, other data being equal, or allowed for. M. Brouc, indeed, went so far, many years ago, as to affirm that, given the number of persons in the public schools of a country, he could deduce the number of suicides which took place there annually. I subjoin a comparison between the percentage of population at school and the suicide rate in Italy, tabulated by Morselli:-