Groups of Suicides from Imitation, almost amounting to minute epidemics, have occurred from several churches, monuments, and elevated structures, their great height being the incentive to the victim to throw himself off; such are the Duomo of Milan, St. Peter’s at Rome, the Campanile of Giotto, Florence, the Vendôme Column, Paris, the Monument, London, the Suspension Bridge at Clifton, and the Archway at Highgate; from this last viaduct, which is protected only by a low wall, there have been four suicides in as many months; in response to repeated representations from Dr. Danford Thomas and myself, the Local Board have at last undertaken to put up a railing on this bridge. After the suicide of Lord Castlereagh, a large number of persons put an end to their lives in the same manner. Several imitational suicides and suicidal attempts occurred in 1841, following the drowning of a young woman in the Thames. She left a letter behind her, explaining her unfortunate love affairs; her case made a great noise at the time, and much public fuss and public sympathy were shewn on her behalf, and no doubt led to her successors’ deaths. After a tragedy at Pentonville, in 1842, in which a man cut the throats of his children and then committed suicide himself, there were within a week two similar cases. At a meeting of the French Academy of Medicine, 1827, Dr. Costel related that, in Paris, at the Hotel des Invalides, a soldier having hung himself on a post, his example was in a very short time followed by twelve other invalided soldiers. The post was removed, and there were no more cases in the building for a considerable period. Legoyt narrates that the drama of “Chatterton,” by M. de Vigny, when performed in Paris, caused many persons to kill themselves in imitation of the hero; and he asserts that the same effect has followed, in France, the study of Ugo Foscolo’s “Jacopo Ortis,” Byron’s “Manfred,” Chateaubriand’s “René,” Constant’s “Adolphus,” and Lamartine’s “Raphael.” Dr. Ebrard, in “Le Suicide,” 1870, condemns the teaching of the stories of the Stoics and their suicides to schoolboys, thinking it blameworthy to familiarise the youthful mind with the idea of self-destruction. In Germany, many references in the literature of our time may be found, in which the study of Pessimism,─the doctrines of Schopenhauer (d. 1860), are blamed for decoying men to self-destruction. The following notice is cut from a newspaper, April 1885: