The Modern Babylon, so great in other things, has a giant’s appetite for mortality. On an average, a thousand persons die in London weekly, and are, as a rule, buried under the ground on which they fall. In old days there was no general record of the character and locality of this great concentrated mortality; but since the establishment of our present system of registration of births, marriages, and deaths, we are able to test not only how many people die, but where they die and what they die of; and are able to tell moreover, to a considerable extent, how far the mortality may be ascribed to inevitable and how far to removable causes. We can now, in fact, almost say, how many die by the folly of man and how many by the law of nature. The volumes in which this information is given are by no means attractive at a first glance. They appear under the authority of a government office, and contain column after column and page after page of forbidding-looking figures, printed in the smallest and closest of type. Yet these account-books, in which the business done by the great destroyer is posted up from day to day, and year to year, contain some highly curious and important facts. The average of a thousand deaths a week in London is by no means evenly distributed over the year, or over all parts of the metropolis. Each season and each parish has its peculiarities. Nor is mortality spread evenly over the various years of life, for the grim tyrant has a special appetite for humanity at particular ages.