that, before giving tables of sickness or mortality to the members of benefit societies, many of the actuaries who have advised them have made no inquiries as to the condition of the neighbourhoods where the members reside or as to their general circumstances. The best advice to the labourers for the future will, however, be proved to be, that the most safe, economical, and efficient outlay as an insurance, will be in their own contributions, in rates or extra rent where needful for the execution of sanitary measures. The further example adverted to as to the efficiency of preventive measures, is furnished by the naval medical service. So dreadful was once the condition of the navy that, in the year 1726, when Admiral Hosier sailed with seven ships of the line to the West Indies, he buried his ships’ companies twice, and died himself of a broken heart. Amongst the pictures then presented, as in Anson’s Voyages, 1740–44, were those of deaths to the amount of eight or ten a-day in a moderate ship’s company; bodies sewn up in hammocks and washing about the decks, for want of strength and spirit on the part of the miserable survivors to cast them overboard. Dr. Johnson, in the year 1778, thus describes a sea life:—“As to the sailor, when you look down from the quarter-deck to the space below, you see the utmost extremity of human misery; such crowding, such filth, such stench!” “A ship is a prison, with the chance of being drowned,—it is worse, worse in every respect; worse air, worse food, worse company.” _Dr. Wilson_, in his preface to the Medical Returns, observes that, within the limits of the South American command, the Centurion, exactly a century ago, lost in a few weeks 200 out of 400 men by scurvy. During the years from 1830 to 1836, the British _squadron_ employed in South America, lost by diseases of every description only 115 out of 17,254 men. He observes—