In America, Bowditch states that the first menstruation of country girls
more often occurs in spring than at any other season.
[160] _Women's Medical Journal_, 1894.
[161] It is, perhaps, worth while noting that the wisdom of the mediaeval
Church found an outlet for this "spring fever" in pilgrimages to remote
shrines. As Chaucer wrote, in the _Canterbury Tales_:--
"Whane that Aprille with his showers sote
The droughts of March hath pierced to the root,
Thaen longen folk to gon on pilgrimages,
And palmers for to seeken strange stronds."
[162] L.W. Kline, "The Migratory Impulse," _American Journal of
Psychology_, 1898, vol. x, especially pp. 21-24.
[163] Mania comes to a crisis in spring, said the old physician, Aretaeus
(Bk. 1, Ch. V).
[164] This is, at all events, the case in France, Prussia, and Italy. See,
for instance, Durkheim's discussion of the cosmic factors of suicide, _Le
Suicide_, 1897, Chapter III. In Spain, as Bernaldo de Quiros shows
(_Criminologia_, p. 69), there is a slight irregular rise in December, but
otherwise the curve is perfectly regular, with maximum in June, and
minimum in January.
[165] This holds good of a south European country, taken separately. A
chart of the annual incidence of suicide by hanging, in Roumania,
presented by Minovici (_Archives d'Anthropologie Criminelle_, 1905, p.
587), shows climaxes of equal height in May and September.
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