will.  As the number of violent deaths can be predicted from year to year with extreme probability in any particular country, so can the average of every season also be foreseen; in fact, these averages are so constant from one period to another as to have almost the specific character of a given statistical series.”  Professor von Oettingen in his valuable work, “Die Moralstatistik,” comes to the very same conclusions as Morselli, although his point of view is entirely different.  After mentioning several of the principal States of Europe, the statistics of which he had examined, Von Oettingen goes on to say that it may be accepted as a general law that the prevalence of suicide in the different months of the year rises and falls with the sun—­in June and July it is most rampant; in November, December and January it descends to a minimum.  In London there are many more suicides in the sunny month of June than in the gloomy month of November, and throughout the whole of England the cold months do not demand nearly so many victims as the hot.  In the face of these indisputable facts Von Oettingen, while rejecting the idea that there is any inexorable fatality, as Buckle believed, connected with their recurrence, is obliged to admit that the hot weather exercises a propelling influence on suicidal tendencies, and that the cold weather on the other hand acts in an opposite direction[18].

    [18] DISTRIBUTION OF SUICIDES IN LONDON BY MONTHS OF EQUAL
    LENGTH PER 10,000, 1865-84:—­

January,   732.               July,      905. 
February,  714.               August,    891. 
March,     840.               September, 705. 
April,     933.               October,   772. 
May,      1003.               November,  726. 
June,     1022.               December,  697.

    Dr. Ogle, vol. xlix., 117. Statistical Society’s Journal.

The influence of temperature is, however, much less powerful on crime than it is on suicide.  It has the effect of raising by one third the number of persons to whom life becomes an intolerable burden, but according to the diagram in the Prison Commissioners’ Reports the highest increase in crime between summer and winter does not amount to more than one twelfth.  In other words, between six and eight per cent. of the crime committed in this country in summer may with reasonable certainty be attributed to the direct action of temperature.  This is a most important result and I should almost hesitate to state it if it were supported by my investigations only.  But this is far from being the case.  In an important paper contributed to the Revista di Discipline Carcerarie for 1886, Dr. Marro, one of the most distinguished students of crime in Italy, has arrived at similar conclusions.  He has shown that in the Italian prisons in the four hottest months of the Italian summer—­May, June, July and August—­there are also the greatest number of offences against prison discipline.  This is a result which coincides in