Outside the medical profession there are few who have the faintest realization of the facts pertaining to malignant disease. One reason for such ignorance is the lack of any organized system, in the United States, for recording the annual mortality. Except among barbarous or semi-civilized people, no such condition exists. When, during the autumn of 1912, Dr. Bashford, the Director of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund of England, was invited to lecture in New York, he confessed that he had tried in vain to obtain American statistics concerning cancer which might be compared to those of other nations; they simply did not exist. There are a few states and a few cities for which mortality records exist, but in some of the principle states of America there is no official record showing even the total number of deaths from murder, from accident, or disease. Once in ten years the Federal Government resents us the mortality report of the census year, but even here the information is not available until a considerable period after it is collated. There is, however, one nation whose official registers for many years have recorded the mortality from each cause of disease, for either sex, and for each ten-year period of life. These records have no equal elsewhere, and are only approached by the mortality records of the Empire of Japan. The figures concerning cancer upon which we may chiefly depend are those which pertain to the English people. There can be no doubts but that the mortality from cancer in America exhibits the same phenomena, though the rate may be higher. The first thing to impress the student is the immensity of the tribute of mortality exacted by this disease, from those in the maturity of life, and in large measure at the period of greatest usefulness. During thirty years, from 1881 to 1910 inclusive, there perished in England and Wales from cancer no less than 703,239 lives. Figures like these, for the average intelligence, are practically incomprehensible; for this thirty-year tribute to malignant disease in a signle country represents more human being than all estimated to have perished on the battlefields of Europe for two hundred years. And if we were able to add the mortality from this one disease on the Continent of Europe, it might represent a total of several millions. Another significant circumstance is the uniformity of the tribute exacted by cancer, year after year. We can see that best by taking the actual number of deaths from this cause, in a single country, and observing with what slow, implacable, and ever-increasing steps the great destroyer advances. DEATHS FROM CANCER IN ENGLAND AND WALES