at the office of the Superintendant. Certified
legal copies may be had at his office, or in
London.

The postmen who bring letters to the Registrar-
General's office, in Somerset Place, have
no sinecure. About nineteen thousand letters
a year are sent out and received there in
reference to points for securing accuracy in
certified copies alone—the largest number of
errors (a curious fact) being made by the
most educated class of persons connected with
the registration—namely, the clergymen of
the Established Church! But the great days
for the postmen are when the certified copies
of the registries begin to pour in after the
end of the quarter. The packets that then
arrive ought to be talked of by hundred-
weights and not by number. Packets are
due from no less than fifteen thousand eight
hundred persons, and by dint of whipping-up
they are all made to do their duty. The
papers so sent up contain the one million
two hundred thousand names already referred
to, and the great job of resolving these into
alphabetical order under the separate headings
of Births, Marriages, and Deaths, has now to
be begun. This is the heaviest business of the
staff of officers engaged in London, and to see
how they get through it we will again walk
into the General Register Office, through the
stone-passage and up the stone-stairs, at the
head of which we first made Major Graham's
acquaintance at the commencement of this
paper. Again, under his official roof, let us
trace the progress of a quarter's papers
through the sixty or seventy pairs of hands,
and under the sixty or seventy pairs of
vigilant eyes, who have to deal with them before
they are finally complete and settled in the
General Register.

When the fifteen thousand local people
have each responded to the demand for their
"returns," and their fifteen thousand
communications have been checked off as received,
the papers are passed into the hands of
Examiners,—a set of clerks under the immediate
control of Major Graham. These gentlemen
pass such as are regular and correct, whilst
those presenting irregularities are sent into
the Error Department, for further inquiry, and
by post forwarded to the offending Registrar.
The papers which have been examined and
found complete, are then sent up to another
room, in which clerks are all the year busily
engaged copying the names upon large sheets
of paper, marked off by lines into portions
about a foot broad, and an inch and a half
deep. These sheets of names are then again
examined; after which they are sent down to
the basement story, where a bookbinder cuts
them into slips of the size so marked off. This
operation is performed by an ordinary plough
machine, and each slip, when separated,
contains one name, and the reference to the
certified sheet on which it may be found. These
slips are then taken to rooms filled with
sorters, the first of whom arranges them with
great rapidity according to the first letter—
all the A's together, all the B's together, all
the C's together, and so on. Another sorter
then takes a letter—say A, for instance—and
arranges all the Ab's together, and all the
Ac's together, and so on. A third clerk then
arranges these again, according to alphabetical
sequence of the third letter. In this way, the
whole of the slips are reduced into strictly
alphabetical regularity, even to the last letter
in each Christian and surname. This done,
the order of the slips is examined by another
officer, and when he has found them to be
correct, they are tied in bundles of three
hundred and twenty each, and are handed to clerks,
who copy them upon parchment sheets, which
sheets are afterwards bound up to form the
great index of names. Every quarter of a year
the certified copies are bound up in eighty-one
huge volumes; that is, twenty-seven of births,
twenty-seven of marriages, and twenty-seven
of deaths; and thus, in a year four times this
number, or three hundred and twenty-four
volumes are added to the collection. This
number is without the Indexes, which
themselves occupy about fourteen volumes a quarter,
or between fifty or sixty for a year. Four
times in each year this labour has to be begun,
continued, and completed!

No sooner has one quarter been cleared off
than another flood of names comes on to be
examined, sorted, copied, and bound up; and
so on from year to year.

The persons engaged on these duties have a
most monotonous task. Imagine the tedium of
going through the list of the eighteen hundred
Jones's who are born, the thirteen hundred
Jones's who die, and the nine hundred Jones's
who marry, every quarter of the year. Imagine
months of a life spent in looking all day at a
repetition of such names, the duty being to
see that Jones is spelt J.O.N.E.S, and in no
other way. To see that it has not been
carelessly made into Jonis or Janes, or otherwise
perverted. Two of the examiners are deaf
and dumb, and another is utterly deaf; and
these gentlemen make, it appears, very
excellent officers. The loss of a sense seems
to assist that concentration of the mind upon
the object in view, which the monotonous
task demands.

The labours of the Register Office afford
some highly curious facts as to the relative
number of persons of different names living
in England and Wales. From time immemorial
it has been thought that Smith was
the commonest of names. The Smith's are
soldiers, and sailors, and parsons, and tailors,
arid bakers, and authors, and, indeed, everything.
But the exact figures of the Registrar
upset the long cherished fallacy that they
form the most numerous of our clans. The
Jones's out-number them and stand at the
head of the list; Smith coming second. This
question of the frequency of particular names
must interest so many persons that we give
the following list of the fifty most common