a fourth are the bridegrooms bachelors and
the brides widows. For every two widows
who get husbands again, three widowers get
second wives; and the widowers take spinsters
twice as often as they take widows.

Of the persons in England and Wales
married in the three years eighteen hundred
and fifty-four, five, and six, only three boys,
but seventy-six girls, were wedded at the age
of fifteen; twenty-three men, but only one
woman, married at the age of eighty. The
great marrying age in this country is twenty.
Twenty-five is only half as popular, and,
between those ages, more persons are married
than in all the other years of life added
together. Under the age of twenty, there are
married in a year in England not very many
more than about two thousand youths of the
male sex, and eleven or twelve thousand
girls; but, after the age of sixty, four times
as many men as women.

In the three years of which the reckonings
stand side by side, there has been in England
and Wales a positive and steady decrease in
the number of deaths. In eighteen hundred
and fifty-four the Metropolis was very much
more fatal to life than the country generally;
but, so much has been done for the
improvement of the health of London, that
amendment has gone forward at double speed,
and the London mortality in the last of the three
years was less than that of the country
generally in either of the previous two;
being very nearly level with the average then
shown by all England and Wales. While
the country advanced from one death in
forty-three to one in forty-nine, the advance
of London was from one in thirty-four to
one in forty-six, which almost means the
saving of one life in every hundred people.
There can be no doubt that this steady
improvement in the general health of the
people is due most especially to the successful
exertions of the men who have been urging,
against every obstacle, the main principles of
sanitary reform; who have got rid of town
burial-grounds, multiplied windows, analysed
poisonous victuals, poured down the ears of
the multitude their little streams of knowledge
about drains, sewers, and good water,
and taught thousands to live in accordance
with the laws by which men's bodies are
governed.

No doubt there is much knowledge of the
ways of Nature necessary for establishment of
the best and most wholesome neighbourly
relations among all the members of a great
community. How best to promote the utmost
degree of moral and material good-fellowship
among twenty or thirty millions of people, so
as to secure for each one the least molestation
and the utmost comfort from those who are
round about him, is a study to which many
studies tend. Call it a science if you will;
it is rather a small system of sciences studied
with special application to one national and
wise purpose.

We look next to the table of deaths in
England and Wales during these three
years, from the several registered diseases;
and here we remark that, although it
certainly does lie without the province of the
statistical department of the Board of Trade,
yet it may be worth considering, whether a
climate table for the three years would not
add point and significance to more than one
section of the information given. Its bearing
on the table of the kinds of disease prevalent
in each year is obvious. We see, for example,
a singular preponderance of death from old
age in eighteen hundred and fifty- five over
deaths from the same cause in the years
before and after it. But there are tables of
agriculture also, and few people can doubt,
though it is not easy to define with any accuracy
the connection that must exist between
tables of weather, poverty and crime.

The fatal disease of the English is consumption.
No other disease kills half, and
but two kill nearly half as many of us in a
twelvemonth; only about half as many die
of age. There were more deaths from
consumption, as there were more from old age,
in eighteen hundred and fifty-five than in the
years before and after, and the yearly death
roll from this cause in England and Wales
is about fifty thousand strong. The two
diseases that destroy, in England, about half
as many people as consumption, are
convulsions, chiefly among children, and another
disease ot the lungs—pneumonia, an
inflammation of their substance.

This disease also was especially fatal in the
year eighteen hundred and fifty-five, and the
next most fatal complaint again a disease
of the lungs—bronchitis, an inflammation of
their air-passages, rose most especially in
danger, being indeed, for once, actually more
than half as fatal as consumption. Yet the
whole mortality was, in that year, less than
in the year preceding it, when there was an
excess of mortality by more than nineteen
thousand deaths from cholera, and by twenty
instead of thirteen thousand deaths from
diarrhoea.

In eighteen hundred and fifty-five, again,
there was more than a double mortality
from influenza. Scarlatina, during the three
years, was becoming a less fatal disorder;
typhus was slowly, but very certainly, on the
decline. Deaths by intemperance were also
decreasing somewhat rapidly in number. The
deaths by cold in the year eighteen hundred
and fifty-five were nearly doubled. In the last
year of the three there was a decided increase
in the number of deaths by poison. In the
two years, eighteen hundred and fifty-five
and fifty-six, by an odd coincidence, there was
precisely the same number of deaths by
hanging and suifocation.

These are the chief points in the
death-table. The steady decrease in the number of
deaths caused by scarlatina, typhus, and
intemperance, give certainty to the inference,