There may be those in your Hon. Court who will hesitate to accept for themselves the firm conviction which I entertain on this subject; or who, at least, will withhold their assent from the line of argument which I have advanced. To them, what I have now to state may be more conclusive than any other consideration: viz., during the year on which I am reporting, there was one sub-district of the City of London Union--one comprising from twelve to thirteen thousand inhabitants, in which (after including a due proportion of deaths which had occurred in the union-workhouse at Mile-end) the mortality stood only at 15 in the thousand; one in which, if those extramural deaths had been excluded, the local death-rate for the year would have been only 13·32.[33] [33] These figures require some correction for decrease of population in the sub-district referred to: the death-rate, inclusive of workhouse mortality, was nearly 16, and exclusive of that mortality, nearly 14 _per_ thousand.--J. S., 1854. For an illustration of low and enviable death-rates, I need then no longer appeal to Northumberland, or to our south-eastern counties--though, no doubt, their septennial periods of low mortality are valuable corroborations of any inference which could be drawn from our more restricted experience;--but I may point to the last year’s death-rate in the north-west sub-district of the City of London Union as one of rare excellence, and may content myself with wishing that that partial rate might become universal for the City, and might be the permanent expression of its average mortality. A detailed consideration of our sickness and mortality during the last year suggests to me a few other remarks, which may, I think, be of practical utility to your Hon. Court. First, as regards the ages at which death occurs; the respective proportions of _timely_ and _untimely_ deaths may, generally speaking, be inferred from the local death-rates. In general terms, we know a high death-rate indicates that many die before their time--indicates that a proportion of the population, more or less considerable, instead of reaching old age, becomes prematurely blighted and extinguished. In order to illustrate this subject to you more exactly, I append a table in which the deaths of the last two years are classified according to the ages at which they occurred. Of 3763 persons whose deaths are recorded in my last Report, 1243 died under the age of five years: of 2752 deaths registered in the present year, 1032 belong to the same early period of life.