_The Importance of Vital Statistics_ In England public health progress has been largely actuated by records of mortality, which have served to make the public realise the need for expenditure of money on sanitary reform. Experience has shown, as Dr. J. S. Fulton has expressed it, that every wheel that turns in the service of public health must be belted to the shaft of vital statistics. Accurate and complete returns of deaths and their causes are essential in investigating the local and occupational incidence of disease, and in comparing the experience of different communities: and the various weekly, quarterly, annual, and decennial reports issued from the Registrar-General’s Department have rendered invaluable service to the cause of public health. “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” It was not the least of Chadwick’s services to the State that he discovered William Farr, who was intrusted with the compilation of, and comment on, our early statistics from 1837 onwards. His reports, with those of Simon, embody the history of sanitary progress in England and the motives and arguments which actuated it. The registration of births similarly enabled comparison of birth-rates to be made; also of maternal mortality in child-bearing and of infant mortality in different areas, and at different parts of the first year of life; and these studies made by medical officers of health and more exhaustively in the Medical Department of the Local Government Board have had great influence in determining the intensive work for improving the conditions of childbearing and of infant rearing, which in recent years has been accomplished. As time went on it became clear that registration of deaths gave a very imperfect view of the prevalence of disease, and that so far as infectious diseases were concerned, valuable time was lost when preventive action could only be taken after the patient’s death. Death registration told of the total wrecks which had occurred during the storm; it gave no information as to early mishaps, enabling others to trim their vessels and thus weather through. It gave a list of killed in battle, not of the wounded also. And so began gradually, in characteristic British fashion, the notification of infectious cases, the list of notifiable diseases being extended from time to time. From 1911 onwards the Local Government Board prepared a weekly statement of infectious cases notified in each sanitary area which was distributed to every medical officer of health. Similar returns of exotic diseases of interest to port medical officers were distributed; and the successive annual summaries prepared in the Medical Department of the Local Government Board showing the incidence of the chief epidemic diseases in every area now constitute one of the most valuable epidemiological records extant.