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(3)
POPULATION.
Before any judgment can be passed upon statistical
returns of births or deaths or marriages, it is
imperative that the fullest details of population shall
be available. Thus a population of children under
school age will have a very high death rate, a
very high sick rate, a high incidence of infectious
diseases, no marriage rate and no birth rate, and thus
it is evident that the age constitution or distribution
of any given population will very materially affect its
rates in these and in other respects.
That Ward A has a high birth rate, while Ward
B has a low one, and that Ward A always has a high
rate of infectious disease, while Ward B's is inappreciable
may be due almost entirely to the fact
that Ward A consists of children and young adults,
while Ward B is the chosen locality of adults on the
declining side of the period of fecundity.
On the other hand differences of birth and
death and infectious rates may be very marked in
the districts compared, and a knowledge of the age
distribution of the population may show that these
differences can not be accounted for on this ground,