I cannot conclude my report without special acknowledgment of the assistance rendered to me by the sub-district registrars of births, deaths, &c., during the past year, which has been one of crisis. For many years the Registrar-General had presented to the several Medical Officers of Health of the Metropolis the original manuscript returns of the causes of all deaths registered within their districts during the previous week, these returns being forwarded by the sub-district registrars to Somerset House, and forming the basis of the Registrar-General’s “Weekly Return.” For this duty the sub-district registrars received no remuneration. The necessity of similar information being supplied to Provincial Medical Officers of Health arose out of the passing of the Public Health Act, 1872, but no such returns being in existence, the information was not forthcoming. Hence many difficulties, into which I need not enter. Suffice it to say that in the Public Health Amendment Act provision was made for the payment of the sub-district registrars by Provincial Sanitary Authorities for information of a precisely similar character to that which had hitherto reached the Metropolitan Medical Officers without expense to the Local Boards. On the passing of the last-named Act, the London registrars, feeling themselves entitled to remuneration for the “secondary use,” by the Medical Officers of their manuscript returns, applied to the Registrar-General on the subject, and he, in turn, requested the Society of Medical Officers of Health to bring the question of payment on a proposed scale before the several Vestries and District Boards. The Society, however, declining the somewhat invidious task, the Registrar-General addressed a similar application to the Local Boards. In the result very few of them consented to the requisition of the Registrar-General, who thereupon gave notice to the Medical Officers that after an appointed day in October he should no longer forward the weekly returns; and he was as good as his word. Greatly to their credit, Messrs. Barnes and Hume spontaneously put themselves in communication with me, promising to send me a duplicate copy of the returns as before; and this they did, until, some time afterwards, a fair and mutually satisfactory arrangement was completed between your Vestry and these gentlemen. The upshot is that I obtain the returns early on Monday morning instead of on Wednesday evening, and I am thus enabled to tabulate the vital statistics up to a period within four days of the date of my monthly reports, instead of eleven days, as under the former arrangement. Additional information of value is also supplied by the registrars, and they continue to forward from day to day, on special forms, notice of any deaths that may have been registered from small-pox, scarlet fever, diphtheria, typhus, enteric, and simple continued fevers, and puerperal fever, &c., so that no time is lost in taking the necessary