To this argument will be opposed the statements, that like other male mammalia, every man is physically competent to conjugally care for an almost indefinite number of women, and that the normal proportion of the sexes is already disturbed by the large number of both who voluntarily remain single, and of both who, released from an earlier bond by divorce or death, marry for a second, a third, or even a fourth time, and by the comparatively earlier death or decrepitude, on the large scale, of females. Upon the other hand, a man’s possible uxorious ability is and should be, no gauge of what it is advisable for him to undertake or to perform. Even in wedlock it is too often the case that men liken themselves in practice to the most bestial of the lower animals, and to their wives are the most exacting and cruel of tyrants. The plea of merely yielding to the impulses of a pure affection is used but too often to sanction the vilest debauchery, for a man, if he choose, may make a brothel of his own nuptial bed. As to plural marriages, confining that term to instances where the unions are successive and legally solemnized, there is a doubt whether as many, if not more, women are not married a second time than men; and as to the comparative mortality of the sexes, it is gradually becoming the way of physicians to study invalid women more closely and more accurately than was formerly the custom, and as a very natural consequence, much oftener to cure them, so that the comparative death rates are gradually assuming a relation more favorable to women than to men, especially if we allow for the greater liability of the latter to accident and other exposure. It will be noticed that the death rate, comparative or positive, of a country is a very different thing from its birth rate, and this again from the fecundity of its population,—that is to say, the rate of its annual increase,—subjects all of them of great interest, both to professional and to non-professional men; the latter of them particularly so to us in our present inquiry, as will hereafter be seen. I may mention, in this connection, that results of two elaborate series of observations in our own country, made from different points of view, but very coincident in their conclusions, have been published by two of the members of the American Medical Association, namely, Dr. Nathan Allen, of Lowell,[14] and myself.[15] Not satisfied with bringing the subject before my own profession, I have endeavored to fix the attention of the scientific world upon the statistics that have been presented, more especially by an article upon the subject in the March number of the leading scientific journal of this country.[16]