=The Registrar-General’s Returns.=--It is obvious that the influence of occupation upon the health of married women cannot be adequately considered without some inquiry as to its effects upon the life and health of their children. As is the case with so many other vitally important branches of industrial life, there is but scanty information of a statistical kind here to guide us, though there is enough local information, taken in conjunction with the general statistics which are published from time to time by the Registrar-General, to establish a close relation between the employment of married women and a high infantile rate of mortality. In his annual report, the Registrar-General goes into the subject in some detail. He begins by pointing out that the year 1891 showed that the proportion of deaths of infants under one year to a thousand registered births was 149 per thousand, a proportion which was equalled in 1886, and slightly exceeded in 1890, but was otherwise higher than in any year of the preceding decennium. He remarks upon the wide differences to be found between the rates in the various counties, and the persistence of these differences from year to year; “the general rule being that the rate is lowest in the purely agricultural, and highest in the mining counties and those of the textile industries. It is in the towns of these latter counties that the infantile mortality assumes the highest proportion; the three towns which are invariably, or almost invariably, the worst in this respect being Preston, Leicester, and Blackburn.” This is highly significant, and but for the fact that statistics have been successful in isolating several towns associated with certain industries in which married women are very largely employed, it might have been urged that the high rate of mortality in the towns was simply due to density of population, lack of fresh air, space, and sunlight. But the Registrar-General, by the tables which he has compiled in his last report, enables us to judge as to the effect upon child life, first, of country air and conditions; secondly, of the average urban conditions; and thirdly, of urban conditions plus the employment of women in factory labour. Seeing that Preston, Leicester, and Blackburn had the highest infantile death-rates of all the towns included in the weekly returns from 1881 to 1891, he has selected them for what we will call Group III. Then he has taken five mining or industrial counties, namely, Staffordshire, Leicestershire, Lancashire, West Riding, and Durham; and three agricultural counties, namely, Hertfordshire, Wiltshire, and Dorsetshire. With the help of the death registers of the various counties and towns for the years 1889, 1890, and 1891, tables have been prepared showing the causes of death and the exact ages of infants under a year old who had died, out of one hundred thousand born in each of the various districts.