whatever may be the real proportions they are below any comparison with the proportions in Paris. The highest proportion of illegitimate to legitimate births given in the returns, were those of the county of Pembroke, 1 in 8; and Radnor, where it is 1 in 7. It may be important to state for the sake of the example, and in illustration of the principle, as to the comparative economy of sanitary arrangements that this excess of 7,000 miserable deaths and burials per annum in Paris, at the least, might be saved by structural sanitary arrangements, which would prevent the accumulation of human beings in winding streets, (some of which are not more than eight or nine feet wide,) under circumstances which render decency, morality, health, or contentment impossible. The whole excess of deaths, as well as the demoralization that arises from overcrowding, might in all probability be saved even by the last vote of expenditure, five millions sterling, (which, at English prices, of 100_l._ for a tenement for a family, would have provided improved tenements, at improved rents, for fifty thousand labourers’ families) for maintaining the war on the Arabs, or by the interest of the money expended in building the immense wall and fortifications round the dangerous population (kept “desperate,” as Jeremy Taylor expresses it, “by a too quick sense of a constant infelicity,”) which those works encircle in Paris. In a copy of a report of the medical commissioners, appointed to examine the cholera, with which I have been favoured by one distinguished member, M. Villerme, and in which I have found powerful corroborative evidence on the influence of structural arrangements on the health and moral, not to speak of the political, condition of the population; they observe, “Le fléau qui a pesé si cruellement sur la capitale s’est fait sentir d’une manière particulièrement désastreuse dans les quartiers étroits, sales et embarrassés de l’ancien Paris; n’y aurait-il pas lieu de signaler ici quelques améliorations utiles à introduire dans ces localités? Les raisons d’état ont souvent dominé les intérêts matériels des villes; autrefois les voies étroites et tortueuses appliquées même aux rues pouvait faire partie des moyens de défense à l’usage de l’état: aujourd’hui des rues larges et droites deviennent dans l’intérieur des villes un premier élément de sécurité publique autant que d’hygiène; il y a donc double avantage à favoriser dans ces conditions, soit des percements nouveaux, soit l’élargissement des voies actuelles.” They give forcible descriptions of population analogous to that found—happily in less proportions,—in the worst part of our cities, and they also attest, from the examination of the inferior population of that capital: “C’est une vérité de tous les temps, de tous les lieux, une vérité, qu’il faut redire sans cesse