Abercrombie remarked, that the most striking peculiarity of melancholia is the propensity to self-murder; under a conviction of overwhelming and helpless misery, the feeling of life to be a burden, arises; and this is succeeded by a determination to quit it. A singular modification is sometimes seen, in which with the desire of death, there exists a sense of the sin of suicide; and to avoid this sin, another idea arises, viz., to bring about the death by committing a murder, and so to be executed. Several instances have been described, in which the insane murderer has distinctly avowed this process of reasoning, disclaiming any malice against the person he had killed, who by the way was generally a child, and in one case the reason for choosing a child was also explained by the lunatic, which was to avoid the risk of sending out of the world a person in a state of unrepented sin. In the north-western and central parts of Europe madness and suicide coincide in intensity. Osiander stated that the scale of madness among the European states has much resemblance to the comparative suicide rates. On an approximate estimation I find that the Germanic stock has 2 madmen per 1,000 persons, the Celtic-Latin has 1 madman per 1,000 persons, the Slavonic has 0·6 only. It is estimated that there are about 300,000 mad persons in the Old World, of whom Germany, France, and England, give the greater number. The French and Italian statistics of insane suicides are not subdivided, and so are not available to show the relative proportions of the forms of insanity; the German numbers give the following result in recent years, 1875 _et seq._:─ ─────────────────┬────────────────── │ Per Cent. FORMS OF LUNACY. ├─────────┬──────── │ Males. │Females. ─────────────────┼─────────┼──────── Religious mania │ 0·7 │ 0·6 Monomania │ 0·6 │ 0·5 Melancholia │ 68·7 │ 69· Brain fever │ 5· │ 2·8 Mania │ 5·1 │ 2·6 Imbecility │ 5·7 │ 5·0 Unnamed │ 14·2 │ 19·5 ─────────────────┴─────────┴──────── With regard to our own country, the last Report of the Lunacy Commissioners for England and Wales shows that of 13,581 patients admitted to the register of lunatics for 1882, 3,877 were stated to have a suicidal propensity, viz., 1,785, or 26·8 per cent. of the males; and 2,092, or 30·2 per cent. of the females. The total number of lunatics in charge for the year 1882 was 76,765, and of these 17 committed suicide: 10 males and 4 females in asylums, 1 male before admission, and 1 male and 1 female while “on leave.” There were 17 suicides also in the year 1881. This small number of actual deaths speaks volumes for the care and attention which must be bestowed on the suicidal patients. The proportion of suicidal tendency was higher among pauper than among well-to-do lunatics.