Note 78 — Chapter XIII · STATISTICS OF SUICIDE.

The disposition to suicide may be manifested very early in life. M. Falret knew a boy, twelve years old, who hanged himself because he was only twelfth in his class. A similar case occurred at the Westminster school about seventeen years ago. Harriet Cooper, of Huden Hill, Rowly-Regis, aged ten years and two months, upon being reproved for a trifling fault, went upstairs, after exhibiting symptoms of grief by sighing and sobbing, and hung herself with a pair of cotton braces from the rail of a tent bed. A girl named Green, eleven years old, drowned herself in the New River, from the fear of correction for a trifling fault. Dr. Schlegel states, on the authority of Casper, that in Berlin, between the years 1812 and 1821, no less than thirty-one children, of twelve years of age and under, committed suicide, either because they were tired of existence or had suffered some trifling chastisement.