The person with a fixed income who settles in a district wishes the district to remain picturesque, rural, and quiet, and, above all, he desires that the 'rates' may be kept down. He naturally objects to be taxed for the sewering of country roads in order that the fields may be covered with courts and alleys of jerry-built houses, and equally he objects to be taxed in order that every railway station in the country may display a large invitation to trippers to invade his solitude and make his life a burden. All sanitarians are agreed that mortality and density of populations are directly proportional. The following figures, taken from Table R (p. xlvii.) of the decennial supplement of the Registrar-General (1895), show this very clearly, as does also the diagram of the mortality figures for London (p. 144). Persons to a square mile Death-rate (corrected) 138 12·70 187 14·48 307 16·47 662 18·55 1,803 20·43 3,299 22·30 4,295 24·51 19,584 33·00 The corrected death-rate for 'Urban England,' as given by the same authority, is 22·32, as against 16·95 for 'Rural England.' To form a just estimate of the comparative healthiness or unhealthiness of a great city like London is no easy matter. The composition of the population is, especially in the central parts, so abnormal in regard to age and sex that unless corrections be made for this abnormality any comparison of London with other places is futile. Such corrections are now made by the Registrar-General. It is probable that in no city are the annual variations of population greater than in London. The population of June (the height of the season) and the population of September (when 'everybody is out of town') must be very different. In September the rich go to the country, the shopkeepers go to the seaside, and the poorest of the poor go hop-picking. The School Board attendances for the first week of September show a deficit of 80,700 children, or 11·1 per cent., figures which clearly demonstrate that the autumn exodus is not limited to the wealthy classes. It is at this season that we see paragraphs in the paper to the effect that the death-rate of some London parish for the Michaelmas quarter reached an incredibly low figure, and we are asked to infer that the population, thanks to the wise policy pursued by the vestry, is fast making for immortality. Of course such statements are not worth the paper they are written on, because there are no data as to population, and the period chosen is so short as to be valueless.