of a South American Estancia I conclude.
The life I lead is, you perceive, a lonely one;
but it is not without its profit and gratification.

A VISIT TO THE REGISTRAR-
GENERAL.

TENS of thousands of people every year pass
along Wellington Street, on their way from
the Strand to Waterloo Bridge, and notice
the empty space over the wall on the left
hand, between the last of the shops and the
turnstile of the toll-collector, and when doing
so, can scarcely fail to note also the tall brick
house-backs which bound the space, and give
an unfinished look to what seems to be an
ugly end of Somerset House. Perhaps not
one in ten thousand of that multitude knows
what the two last of those common-place brick
buildings contain, or the spot would at once
be interesting. The place would no longer be
a mass of dingy brick and mortar, but would
grow in interest as the centre to which comes
the earliest, and most authentic, and where
remains the most lasting record of the three
great epochs in the existence of our great
family of twenty odd millions of English
people—the births, the marriages, and deaths
—of the nation. The whole house would
swell into the semblance of a huge book, with
leaves as endless as the flow of the stream
near by; names in hundreds, thousands, tens
of thousands, millions—almost as countless as
the ripples of the Thames, and, like them,
ever and ever repeated.

The most humble and the most lofty are
chronicled alike in the parchment indexes of
that great counting-house,—the unwelcome off-
spring of the pauper, and the cambric-clad heir
of the peer; the wedding of Thomas Nokes
with Mary Styles, and the fashionable alliance
of the Right Hon. the Lord Fitz Philp with the
Lady Adelina De Vavasour; the death of the
felon in the gaol, of the outcast in the hospital,
of the good man amid his family, of the noble
in his palace—all alike have their record
in the archives of the place. Pages enough
to line Waterloo Bridge from end to end—
tons weight of paper and of parchment—are
needed for all this. But there they are. Each
man posted out in his right place—chronicled
and certified with official exactness—and all
in such strictly alphabetical order, that the
record of him may be found at any time in a
marvellously few minutes. Smith, or Jones,
who hurries across Waterloo' Bridge to see
his newly-wedded wife, little thinks that a
whole housefull of clerks are at that moment
passing the entry of the "happy event" from
room to room, till it is finally and correctly
stated and bound up in the archives of the
Registrar. Thompson, or Jackson, who are
proudly mounting outside the Waterloo 'bus,
to make the best of their way to Camberwell,
where their first-born is being dressed out for
the christening, don't know that the little
innocent will shortly be inscribed on the
parchment indexes of the grand muster-roll
of the British nation; nor is that heart-
broken widow, just paying one of her last
halfpence to cross the bridge, aware that the
note of her partner's death has already passed
into the black volumes of the Registrar; and
that in the cellar-floor, deep down there over
the wall, a zealous physician, searching for
facts about mortality, has just numbered him
amongst the thousands of other victims who
fall year by year the early victims of the fleshless
spectre—Consumption.

This enumeration of the people is not
merely startling or curious—it is most
important for a variety of purposes. In
questions of succession to property, registers of
births, marriages and deaths, are most essential.
The facts collected under this system
throw great light upon the causes that affect
the health of the people, thereby tending to
show how sickness may be avoided, and life
be lengthened. The number of marriages
in any given period affords an unerring
index to the opinions entertained by the
people of their prospects in the world.
When they are well off, they marry; when
poorly off, matrimony is at a discount.
Whilst the deaths indicate by their increase
the past sufferings, or by their comparative
fewness, the prosperity of the masses. The
returns to the registrar, therefore, are a
kind of barometer of the real state of the
nation, valuable alike to the philosopher, the
statesman, the physician, the lawyer, and the
man of business.

Unfortunately, the present mode of Registration
has only been in operation since 1837.
Before that time almost the only record of
births, deaths, and marriages, was in the
parish registers, and how miserably imperfectly
such books were kept, was shown in the
evidence taken before a Parliamentary
Committee appointed at the suggestion of the
dissenters to inquire into the subject. Since
that year—that is, in the twelve years and
three-quarters between 1838 and the autumn
of 1850, the enormous number of one million
six hundred and thirty-five thousand eight
hundred and ten men, and an equal number,
of course, of women, have been married in
England and Wales; six millions, eight
hundred and one thousand, two hundred and
five children have been born; and four
millions seven hundred and twenty thousand
and seventy-four persons have died. The
names of all these, with various circumstances
connected with them, have been chronicled
in the Registrar's office! How this labour
was accomplished and how day by day and
year by year it is now progressing, as fresh
births, deaths, and marriages, are perpetually
demanding notice let us now demonstrate.

The office where this system of national
book-keeping goes on, is The General Register
Office, and to find it, we must walk from the
bustle of the Strand, into the handsome
quadrangle of Somerset House, and thence