In the Colchester Hut the patient is received into a separate compartment, of which there are four, where she is delivered and remains until discharged to quarters. It is very rarely indeed, if ever, that all the four compartments are occupied simultaneously. The average stay is ten days; the average number of deliveries a year under 50. This hut does not form part of a hospital. It is a separate establishment, solely for lying-in women, as such accommodation should always be. _Note._—There is another reason, though it may be termed a fanciful one, for altogether disconnecting lying-in institutions with general hospitals, and even with the name and idea of hospital. It is this: there must be a certain death-rate in a general hospital, receiving as it does fatal diseases and fatal accidents, as long as men and women have fatal diseases and fatal accidents. But lying-in is not a fatal disease, nor a disease at all. It is not a fatal accident, nor an accident at all. Unless from causes unconnected with the puerperal state, no woman ought to die in her lying-in; and there ought, in a lying-in institution, to be no death-rate at all. It is dangerously deadening our senses to this fact—viz., that there ought to be _no_ deaths in a lying-in institution—if we connect it in the least degree with the name of hospital, so long as a hospital means a place for the reception of diseases and accidents. In French statistics, this confusion of ideas, were it not ghastly, would be ludicrous. ‘Admissions,’ under the head ‘Malades,’ include not only the lying-in women, but the new-born infants, which appear to be ‘admitted’ to life and to hospital together, as if life were synonymous with disease, so that, e.g. 4,000 ‘Admissions,’ in such a year, to the Paris Maternité would mean 2,000 deliveries, 2,000 births—[and—how many deaths?] _RECAPITULATION._ In summing up the evidence regarding excessive mortality in lying-in institutions and its causes, it appears:— 1. That, making every allowance for unavoidable inaccuracies in statistics of midwifery practice, there is sufficient evidence to show that in lying-in wards there reigns a death-rate many times the amount of that which takes place in home deliveries. 2. That a great cause of mortality in these establishments is ‘blood-poisoning,’ and that this arises from the greater susceptibility of lying-in women to diseases connected with this cause. From whence it follows that in many lying-in wards, as at present arranged and managed, there must be conditions and circumstances apart from those belonging to the inmates personally, which aid in the development of this morbid state.