The earliest registers of deaths are those of Aberdeen, which commence in 1560; Perth, beginning in 1561, and the Canongate, Edinburgh, in 1565. The register of burials in the last-named parish commences in 1612, and that of Greyfriars in 1658. Those of rural parishes generally commence in the last century, and they are, as a rule, more or less imperfect. It appears from the Edinburgh registers, in which the deaths are summarised annually, that the mortality has greatly diminished during the last hundred and fifty years. In the first four decades of the last century, nearly two-thirds of the deaths were those of children, and the deaths of adult females were double those of adult males. The dawn of a better state of things appears in 1741, when the deaths of 276 men, 401 women, and 942 children, were registered, which, if we accept the generally received statement that the population of the city was then fifty thousand, gives an annual average death-rate of 34 per thousand. The average mortality of the ten years ending with 1878, as shown by the report of the Registrar General, was 24 per thousand; and that of the week ending October 8, 1898, was 20 per thousand; which was precisely that of the thirty-three largest towns of the southern portion of the island. Contemporary events in other places were not unfrequently recorded in the local registers of deaths in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Thus, in the Aberdeen register, we have the murder of Lord Darnley very circumstantially recorded as follows, though under a wrong date:--"The ninth [10th] day of February, the year of God 1566, Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, King of Scotland, who married Mary Stuart, Queen of Scotland, daughter to King James the Fifth, was cruelly murdered under night, in Edinburgh, in the Cowgate, at the Kirk of Field, by James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, and other his assisters, whose deed God revenge. So be it."[13] The ascription of the crime to Bothwell does not appear in the Canongate register, which merely records the fact of Darnley being blown up with gunpowder. The assassination of the Earl of Murray is recorded in several parish registers. The session clerk of Aberdeen recorded it, with much particularity, as follows:--"The twenty-third day of January, the year of God 1569, James, Earl of Murray, Lord Abernethy, Regent to the King and realm of Scotland, was cruelly murdered and shot in the town of Linlithgow, by a false traitor, James Hamilton of Bodywallhaucht, by the conspiracy and treason of his own servant, William Kircaldy, and John Hamilton, bloody Bishop of St. Andrew's, whose deed we pray God to revenge. So be it." With equal circumstantiality the same clerk made an entry in the register of the murder of Coligny, and the horrible massacre of the Protestants of Paris, on St. Bartholomew's day, 1572, which event he prays God to revenge.