greatest number of proprietors of land, 285 per 1000 inhabitants, the birth-rate is only 24·7, against 28·1 in those departments where there are only 177 proprietors per 1000 of the population. The professional classes in France are so thoughtful in regard to the number of children they bring into the world, that they do not have quite two children (1·75) to a family; whilst the average children to a family in France does not exceed 3, against 5 in Germany, 4½ in England, 5¼ in Scotland, and 5½ in poor and distressed Ireland. How true it is, then, what James Mill and Mr. Francis Place predicted! Universally we may say of modern Europeans, that the poorer classes are less prudent in the size of their families; and, indeed, it has been said by M. de Haussonville (“La vie et les salaires à Paris”) that the number of children to a family in the poor quarters of Paris is three times as great as it is in the rich quarters. The same story holds nearly true in modern London since 1877—_i.e._, since the date of the trial of Mr. Charles Bradlaugh and Mrs. Annie Besant; for the birth-rate in Kensington is at present 20 per 1000, against 40 per 1000 in Bethnal Green, a result which is yearly becoming due rather to small families in the West End than to late marriages or celibacy, the old-fashioned causes of lower birth-rates. The celebrated cases of “Regina _v._ Bradlaugh and Besant,” “Regina _v._ Edward Truelove,” and, at this moment, of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh against the esteemed and learned physician, Dr. H. A. Allbutt, of Leeds, who is threatened by that body with expulsion from the list of its members, because he has published, in a popular work of a practical character, what has been said so many times, that large families lead to early death, prostitution, and every horror to which mortality is subject, have disclosed the fact that there is an idea strongly implanted in the minds of the majority of mankind, that, if people in general knew, especially at an early age, what any medical student knows as soon as he commences to study anatomy and physiology, vice and profligacy would immediately abound. This is, indeed, a strange idea. Civilisation differs from savage life mainly in that civilised men know more of nature than savages; but, just on that very account, civilised people are more moral than savages. “It is impossible for us to understand,” says M. Joseph Garnier, “how the counsels of marital prudence can lead to the abolition of marriage and the debauchery of the young. Has not prudence the effect of rendering the state of marriage more happy and more attractive? Youth is encouraged to marriage more easily by the example of prosperous and wisely managed households than by the example of households crushed under the tortures of misery.” And M. Villermé, one of the greatest writers on Health that this century has produced, mentions that the workmen of La Croix Rouge, Lyons, had, in his day, an