In the course of a study as to the consumption of bread in Normal schools
during each month of the year, as illustrating the relationship between
intellectual work and nutrition, Binet presents a number of curves which
bring out results to which he makes no allusion, as they are outside his
own investigation. Almost without exception, these curves show that there
is an increase in the consumption of bread in spring and in autumn, the
spring rise being in February, March, and April; the autumn rise in
October or November. There are, however, certain fallacies in dealing with
institutions like Normal schools, where the conditions are not perfectly
regular throughout the year, owing to vacations, etc. It is, therefore,
instructive to find that under the monotonous conditions of prison-life
precisely the same spring and autumn rises are found. Binet takes the
consumption of bread in the women's prison at Clermont, where some four
hundred prisoners, chiefly between the ages of thirty and forty, are
confined, and he presents two curves for the years 1895 and 1896. The
curves for these two years show certain marked disagreements with each
other, but both unite in presenting a distinct rise in April, preceded and
followed by a fall, and both present a still more marked autumn rise, in
one case in September and November, in the other case in October.[169]
Some years ago, Sir J. Crichton-Browne stated that a
manifestation of the sexual stimulus of spring is to be found in
the large number of novels read during the month of March
("Address in Psychology" at the annual meeting of the British
Medical Association, Leeds, 1889; _Lancet_, August 14, 1889).
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