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. The curve
presented in Chart 4 shows the admissions to the London County Council
Lunatic Asylums during the years 1893 to 1897 inclusive; I have arranged
it in two-month periods, to neutralize unimportant oscillations. In order
to show that this curve is not due to local or accidental circumstances,
we may turn to France and take a special and chronic form of mental
disease: Garnier, in his _Folie a Paris_, presents an almost exactly
similar curve of the admissions of cases of general paralysis to the
Infirmerie Speciale at Paris during the years 1886-88 (Chart 5). Both
curves alike show a major climax in spring and a minor climax in autumn.

Crime in general in temperate climates tends to reach its maximum
at the beginning of the hot season, usually in June. Thus, in
Belgium, the minimum is in February; the maximum in June, thence
gradually diminishing (Lentz, _Bulletin Societe Mede