PUERPERAL MORTALITY.—Some difficulty is experienced in procuring a correct record of the deaths arising out of or connected with childbed, owing to the fact that reference to the previous occurrence of childbirth is sometimes omitted in the medical certificate of the cause of death. Some of the deaths, therefore, registered as Peritonitis, Pyæmia, Erysipelas, and even under less suggestive headings, may have been connected with the puerperal state. The deaths actually ascribed to childbed diseases were 24, other 14 being set down to the various accidents incident to that critical period. These numbers together represent a mortality somewhat below one per cent. (0.87) on the births registered. Dr. Matthews Duncan, the successor of Sir James Simpson at the University of Edinburgh, has promulgated an opinion that the true average mortality of the puerperal state is one per cent., _i.e._, one death in every hundred confinements; an estimate which a practitioner in this parish, who has a most extensive midwifery practice, tells me coincides with his personal experience. The causes of death as registered were:—_Puerperal fever_, 4; _Puerperal peritonitis_, 9; _Pyæmia_, 5; _Septicæmia_, 1; _Metritis_, 4; _Pelvic cellulitis_, 1. Eighteen of the deaths occurred in the Town sub-district, the mortality being pretty evenly spread over the parish, and none of the cases being traceable to contagion. They occurred in the four quarters respectively as follows—9, 6, 5, and 4. The ages at death were: 20–30 years, 18; 30–40 years, 4; 40 years and upwards, 2. _Syphilis_ nominally caused 12 deaths—a number we may well believe below the actual mortality from this Protean disease. CONSTITUTIONAL DISEASES.—_Cancer_ was the cause of 67 deaths, viz., 51 in the Town and 16 in Brompton. Fifty-four of the deaths took place between the ages of 45 and 75. THE TUBERCULAR DISEASES caused 408 deaths, viz., 325 in the Town and 73 in Brompton. _Scrofula_ was the registered disease in 27 cases, _Tabes mesenterica_ in 53, _Phthisis_ in 245, and _Hydrocephalus_ or _Meningitis_ in 82 cases. The numbers of deaths in the several quarters were—1st, 113; 2nd, 104; 3rd, 88; and 4th, 103:—216 in the winter and 192 in the summer quarters. One hundred and fifty-seven of the deaths were those of children under the age of five years. This mortality is exclusive of those brain affections, _Convulsions_, &c., and those diseases called developmental which, under the names of _Atrophy_ and _Premature birth_, are nearly allied to the tubercular diseases specially so-called.