safety of traveling by rail, but to its relative danger in different communities. Allowance for this discrepancy can, however, be made by adding to the English official results an additional nineteen per cent., that, according to the returns of 1877 and 1878, being the proportion of the season-ticket to other passengers on the roads of Great Britain. Taking then the Board of Trade returns for the eight years 1870-7, it will be found that during this period about one passenger in each 14,500,000 carried in that country has been killed in railroad accidents, and about one in each 436,000 injured. This may be assumed as a fair average for purpose of comparison, though it ought to be said that in Great Britain the percentage of casualties to passengers shows a decided tendency to decrease, and during the years 1877-8 the percentages of killed fell from one in 15,000,000 to one in 38,000,000 and those of injured from one in 436,000 to one in 766,000. The aggregates from which these results are deduced are so enormous, rising into the thousands of millions, that a certain degree of reliance can be placed on them. In the case of Massachusetts, however, the entire period during which the statistics are entitled to the slightest weight includes only eight years, 1872-9, and offers an aggregate of but 274,000,000 journeys, or but about forty per cent. of those included in the British returns of the single year 1878. During these years the killed in Massachusetts were one in each 13,000,000 and the injured one in each 1,230,000;--or, while the killed in the two cases were very nearly in the same proportion,--respectively one in 14.5, and one in 13, speaking in millions,--the British injured were really three to one of the Massachusetts. The equality as respects the killed in this comparison, and the marked discrepancy as respects the injured is calculated at first sight to throw doubts on the fullness of the Massachusetts returns. There seems no good reason why the injured should in the one case be so much more numerous than in the other. This, however, is susceptible on closer examination of a very simple and satisfactory explanation. In case of accident the danger of sustaining slight personal injury is not so great in Massachusetts as in Great Britain. This is due to the heavier and more solid construction of the American passenger coaches, and their different interior arrangement. This fact, and the real cause of the large number of slightly injured,--"shaken" they call it,--in the English railroad accidents is made very apparent in the following extract from Mr. Calcroft's report for 1877;--