Modern science is invading all the old realms of whims and fancies, charms and witchcrafts, prejudices and superstitions. No kind of ignorance seems sacred from attack. The wise men of our generation are evidently bent beyond recall on finding out all things that may by possibility be discoverable, no matter what pains the search may impose. Not content with making lightning run messages, chemistry polish boots, and steam deliver parcels and passengers, the _savants_ are superseding the astrologers of old days, and the gipsies and wise women of modern ones, by finding out and revealing the hitherto hidden laws which rule that charming mystery of mysteries—that lode star of young maidens and gay bachelors—matrimony. In our fourteenth number we gave a description of the facts made out by the returns of the Registrar-General on the subject of life and death in London and the Country. The office of that official has some other duties, however, beyond that of chronicling the business of mortality and birth in this land of ours. There is a third great heading in his tables, under which there are long lists of serious looking figures, and they tell, not in units, or in _fews_, like the back page of a newspaper, but in tens of thousands, how many marriages take place in England. And besides the mere number of these interesting events, these figures reveal what are found to be the laws regulating their frequency and other circumstances connected with them, such as how many couples are joined by the costly and unusual mode of special license; how many by ordinary license; how many (and they are the great majority) by the old English fashion of “out-asking” by banns; how many by the new systems introduced for the union of various classes of dissenters, at Registrars’ offices, in registered places of worship; how many between Quakers and between Jews; and, beyond all these particulars, how many young folks, hot of heart and full of courage, take the awful plunge into matrimony whilst “not of full age;” how many men reject the advice of Sir Roger de Coverley, and marry widows; and how many widows, like the wife of Bath, love matrimony so well that when once released from its bonds they tie themselves up in them again. The history of this registration of marriages is soon told. This plan of recording the matrimonial engagements of the country commenced in 1745, when the marriage act came into operation. Before that date marriages were performed clandestinely, and by such extraordinary persons that any correct record of their number was impossible. “Fleet marriages” are thus noticed by Smollett:—“There was a band of profligate miscreants, the refuse of the clergy, dead to every sentiment of virtue, abandoned to all sense of decency and decorum, for the most part prisoners for debt or delinquency, and indeed the very outcasts of human society, who hovered about the verge of the Fleet Prison to intercept customers,