No less than seven suicides effected or attempted were reported in Paris one day last week. At five in the morning, a packing-case maker in the Faubourg St. Martin, named Rozette, took a dose of laudanum, and was removed to a hospital in a critical state; at seven, a messenger was found hanging in his lodgings at an hotel in the Rue de Chartres; about the same time a concierge at 16, Rue Chalgrin, committed suicide with charcoal; at eight, a retired tradesman, aged 62, killed himself by firing a revolver in his mouth; at one, a man living in the Place de la Chapelle, stabbed himself with a shoemaker’s knife; at four, a porter at the Central Markets shot himself with a revolver; and lastly, at ten in the evening, a tailor, living at the Rue Bonaparte, shot himself twice in the head while riding in a cab.─_Galignani._ I have reason to believe that it is perfectly true (although it has been denied) that a very considerable number of French officers and men slew themselves in the confusion and headlong retreat which followed the general advance of the English line, at the close of the battle of Waterloo, when the confusion was made worse confounded by the additional onslaught of the Prussians from the flank. M. Legoyt also narrates this statement as authentic, and there is no inherent improbability in it, if we consider that among those who fled, were the “Old Guard” who had never known defeat. The love of notoriety also comes in for mention in this place. One man has killed himself by attaching his body to a rocket, and then setting fire to the fuse; nothing but a desire to be notorious seems to explain this action. Another man threw himself into the crater of Mount Vesuvius. Empedocles, the philosopher, threw himself into the crater of Mount Etna. Soon after the death of Miss Moyes the first of a series of suicides from the Monument, London, Elam narrates that a lad took poison with the intent to kill himself; when questioned by the police, he answered, “I wished to be talked about, like the woman who threw herself off the Monument.” And this is a very fair example of many instances of voluntary death, but whether it forms a good public policy to call those sufferers insane is questionable: personally, I think that such persons are encouraged by the neglect to stigmatise them as criminals. It is not every suicide from a dangerous height that is caused by imitation; there does undoubtedly exist a peculiar form of fascination, apt to arise from a sense of insecurity, such as occurs to a person standing on a cliff or a house top, and I am convinced that this fascination does cause many _involuntary_ suicides. Mental debility is a cause of it, and so is dyspepsia, and I expect that like lack of courage it is a matter of lack of health. Other forms of this weakness are occasionally seen; some men dare not trust themselves with a razor, and others have a terror of handling a revolver.