No crime seems to have so strong a tendency to spread by example and imitation as this one. Epidemics have occurred on many occasions, and I have already mentioned an epidemic of suicide taking place among the soldiers of Tarquinius Superbus. At Alexandria, in the time of the Ptolemies, an epidemic was originated by Hegesias the philosopher, who discoursed so eloquently on the numerous trials of this life and the pleasures of death, that numbers of persons destroyed themselves; and the philosopher was banished. When Xanthus, a city of Lycia, was conquered by Brutus, the citizens slew themselves by hundreds. At Miletus the women committed suicide in large numbers, because their husbands and lovers were detained by the wars: they hanged themselves; the frenzy was checked by an edict that their bodies were to be dragged naked through the streets. Other examples of wholesale suicide are shown by the people of Sidon, who burned their city and themselves when besieged by Artaxerxes Ochus, by the Tyrians when conquered by Alexander, and by the Acheans when defeated by Metellus. At Marseilles, an old historian records that at one time the young women made it quite a habit to kill themselves when their lovers were not constant to them.─(Esquirol.) Large numbers of suicides were committed by Christians in the terrible times of persecution in the reigns of Nero, Decius, and Diocletian. In the dancing mania and the follies of Tarantulism in Naples, between 1500 and 1600, the patients often thronged in crowds to the sea shore, and rushed singing into the waves, as Lecky narrates. An epidemic of drowning affecting women alone also occurred at Lyons; these cases had no apparent cause; it was checked by an order to expose all the bodies naked in the market. _See_ Spon, “Histoire de la Ville de Lyon,” 1676, and Primerosius Jacobus, “De mulierum morbis,” 1665. Sydenham is the authority for the statement that suicide prevailed to an alarming degree in Mansfield in the year 1697; and at Versailles, in 1793, 300 persons killed themselves. At Rouen in 1806, at Stuttgardt in 1811, epidemics occurred. In Valois an epidemic of hanging took place in 1813, see Sydenham, “Complete Works,” vol. ii. In July and August 1806, 300 persons committed suicide in Copenhagen; these cases formed a distinctly marked epidemic. Suicide is almost epidemic, or endemic, in connection with the disease Pellagra in Italy, Spain, and the South of France. It is said that one-third of the victims of this disease kill themselves. This scourge appears to be a nervous affection, associated with erythema and degeneration of the skin, and dependent partly on the effect of the sun, especially in spring, and partly on the consumption of unhealthy maize as food; its most usual termination is in dementia.