We have already, in some words about weather wisdom, spoken of certain diagrams in which the changes of our English seasons have been delineated, and in which the characteristics of succeeding years are shown by curved lines. At the Registrar-General’s sanctum—a quiet office in the quietest part of Somerset House—Mr. Farr has reduced those curves to circles, and the results display themselves in the shape of coloured diagrams, showing the varying temperature of years, and the degree in which temperature influences mortality. The mean temperature of the year arrives in spring about the 115th day, and in autumn about the 293rd day of the year. The coldest period is the first three weeks in January, the hottest days being from about the 200th to the 220th of the year. In the diagrams that exhibit these facts, certain spaces represent each one hundred deaths, and we soon see how much more favourable to life in England warm weather is than cold. In hot countries the reverse is the rule, hot seasons being fatal seasons, because excess at either end of the scale it is which does the mischief. In England the plague and other epidemics, which made such havoc amongst our forefathers were brought to killing intensity, in unusually hot seasons. But deficient as our sanitary regulations now are, they have been so greatly improved within the last century or two, that summer is no longer our period of greatest average mortality, unless we suffer from some terrible visitant like cholera, and then, of course, all ordinary calculations are set at nought. Moderation suits all human beings. Our excess of heat or of cold raises the mortality; moderate warmth being more favourable, however, than moderate cold. Mortality in the Metropolis seems regulated by a variety of circumstances, the principal being the elevation of each district above the level of the river Thames; the number of persons who live in the same house; the size and character of the house as regards ventilation and cleanliness; the state of the sewerage; the number of paupers in the neighbourhood; and the abundant and good, or scanty and bad, supply of water. Each London parish has its rank and value in the registrar’s records of health and death; and the figures are so exact, that there is no evading the verdict they pronounce. At first thought, one might be inclined to expect that all the health would be found where all the wealth and fashion are congregated. But it is not so. As a rule, those districts stand well whose inhabitants are most blessed with the good things of this life, but, running through the catalogue as arranged in the order of their salubrity, we find some localities above the average of health—nay, one at the very top—which fashion knows nothing of.