Report of the Council, presented at the Thirty-Second Anniver- On the Frequent Autumnal Pressure in the Money Market, and the Action of the Bank of England. By W. STANLEY Observations on French Population Statistics, particularly those Miscellanea :-Brief Account of a General Mathematical Theory Opening Address of the President of Section F (Economic Science and Statistics), of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, at the Thirty-Sixth Meeting, at A Notice of Professor J. E. T. Rogers's History of Agriculture An Analysis with Percentages, of the "Summary of Wrecks and Casualties reported in 'Lloyd's List' from January to March inclusive 1866," issued by the Statistical Committee of Lloyd's. Tabulated by HENRY JEULA, F.R.L.S., F.S.S. 606-609 JOURNAL OF THE STATISTICAL SOCIETY, MARCH, 1863. MORTALITY of CHILDREN in the PRINCIPAL STATES of EUROPE. By WILLIAM FARR, ESQ., M.D., D.C.L., F.R.S. [Continued from p. 149, vol. xxviii.] [Read before the Statistical Society, December, 1865.] WORDSWORTH, with the insight of a great poet into life, has said truly: “The Child is father of the Man." Unless the child survive the perils of childhood, the man cannot exist; and while existence endures, it retains in the poet, the soldier, or the labourer, ineffaceable traces of the conditions of childhood. I have to ask you now to fix your attention upon the children of Europe under five years of age. Some of them are in swaddling clothes, only capable of sucking or uttering inarticulate cries; others are active intelligent boys and girls, such as you see mustered in infant schools. They are helpless and dependent. They consume and are unproductive; they are of no occupation; so in the eyes of an economist of the old school they are worth nothing.* Yet they fill a large space in the affections of mankind: they exist in millions: the little children of our day will be the soldiers, sailors, workmen, parents, of the generation to come; and the torch of industry can only be transmitted through their hands to future ages. We may then well inquire with some anxiety, what is now the condition of children in the principal States of Europe? This is a large subject. We may endeavour to ascertain, with M. Quetelet in Belgium, the height and weight of the children of the several races. We may test their strength, or depict their form in its wide ranges through Holland, England, and Italy. Their intelligence and passions vary and invite research. But leaving these themes, I have only to inquire here into their mortality; its extent, its causes, and the evils which it reveals, with a view to the discovery of remedies. It is well known that a large and variable proportion of children * See estimate of the money value of a man at different ages, in vol. xvi, pp. 43-4, of the Statistical Journal. VOL. XXIX. PART I. B die in the first five years of age; and that while in certain conditions they nearly all survive, in other conditions they nearly all perish. On like conditions the lives of animals depend. The young of some vertebrate animals are able to run about shortly after birth, and to a certain extent to take care of themselves. Among birds, we have chickens and ducklings at home almost as soon as they are born; the young of thrushes, sparrows, pigeons, and ravens, naked and defenceless, are nurtured with warmth and food by the parent birds. While colts, calves, lambs, pigs, and kids, run about; kittens and whelps are born blind. But in all cases the affection and intelligence of the parents prove equal to the occasion, either in the wild or domestic species. So it is, as a rule, in the supreme race of the world. The boy is no sooner born than he begins to breathe, while his arterialized blood circulates through his limbs and lungs; his body is cleansed and clothed and warmed; he is supplied with food at his mother's breasts, and nursed in her arms. The umbilical cord is tied; the breathing, if it sometimes pauses, is excited. The circulation and the breath are easily stopped; a few drops of laudanum are fatal; so is exposure to severe cold, and so is privation of food. The child may be prematurely born; or be left by his lost mother without milk, helpless, to the care of strangers. The frame may be deformed or diseased, and ready for dissolution. In many of these cases death is inevitable. It must be evident, from all these considerations, that the life of the infant in its first year of age is almost indissolubly bound up with the life of the mother, and to a certain extent with that of the father, from whom the means of living are derived. Night and day the infant requires tendence; if the poor mother, therefore, is taken from home habitually, to work either in the field or the factory, and the rich mother is absorbed by the claims of society, the infant is in either case neglected and partially abandoned. Marriage is not only a sacred bond of perpetual love, but a compact between husband and wife to fulfil the contingent duties of father and mother. The child is thus insured, to a certain extent, protection during the longest of two lives. In consequence, however, of crime, vice, drunkenness, illness, ill-fortune, or bad times, the parents of large families especially are reduced to extremities, in which their children inevitably suffer the want not only of the comforts, but of the necessaries of life. Such is the fate of many children born in wedlock. The number of children born in any country out of wedlock is not exactly known, but it is considerable and variable. They have parents in all classes of society, and some great men in history have been bastards; but bastards have generally been ill-treated, and even |