From this table we are to understand that out of one hundred thousand married persons (including widowers) from 20 to 25 years old, 626 die in the course of each year; while out of a similar number of unmarried persons, between the same ages, no less than 1,231 die in each year. And in like manner all the other lines of the table are to be interpreted. Commenting on the evidence supplied by the above figures, Dr. Stark stated that ‘bachelorhood is more destructive to life than the most unwholesome trades, or than residence in an unwholesome house or district, where there has never been the most distant attempt at sanitary improvement of any kind.’ And this view has been very generally accepted, not only by the public, but by professed statisticians. Yet, as a matter of fact, I believe that no such inferences can legitimately be drawn from the above table. Dr. Stark appears to me to have fallen into the mistake, which M. Quetelet tells us is so common, of trying to make his statistics carry more weight than they are capable of bearing. It is important that the matter should be put in a just light, for the Royal Commission on the Law of Marriage has revealed no more striking fact than that of the prevalence of immature marriages, and such reasoning as Dr. Stark’s certainly cannot tend to discourage these unwise alliances. If death strikes down in five years only half as many of those who are married as of those who are unmarried between the ages of 20 and 25 (as appears from the above table), and if the proportion of deaths between the two classes goes on continually diminishing in each successive lustre (as is also shown by the above table), it seems reasonable to infer that the death-rate would be even more strikingly disproportionate for persons between the ages of fifteen and twenty than for persons between the ages of twenty and twenty-five. I believe, indeed, that if Dr. Stark had extended his table to include the former ages, the result would have been such as I have indicated. Yet few will suppose that very youthful marriages can exercise so singularly beneficial an effect.