' Many of the
others who reported, incidentally mentioned the love affairs as
beginning in the spring. This also agrees with my own
observations."
Crichton-Browne remarks that children in springtime exhibit restlessness,
excitability, perversity, and indisposition to exertion that are not
displayed at other times. This condition, sometimes known as "spring
fever," has been studied in over a hundred cases, both children and
adults, by Kline. The majority of these report a feeling of tiredness,
languor, lassitude, sometimes restlessness, sometimes drowsiness. There is
often a feeling of suffocation, and a longing for Nature and fresh air and
day-dreams, while work seems distasteful and unsatisfactory. Change is
felt to be necessary at all costs, and sometimes there is a desire to
begin some new plan of life.[161] In both sexes there is frequently a wave
of sexual emotion, a longing for love. Kline also found by examination of
a very large number of cases that between the ages of four and seventeen
it is in spring that running away from home most often occurs. He suggests
that this whole group of phenomena may be due to the shifting of the
metabolic processes from the ordinary grooves into reproductive channels,
and seeks to bring it into connection with the migrations of animals for
reproductive purposes.[162]
It has long been known that the occurrence of insanity follows an annual
curve,[163] and though our knowledge of this curve, being founded on the
date of admissions to asylums, cannot be said to be quite precise, it
fairly corresponds to the outbreaks of acute insanity.
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