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thing for mothers to desire that all the children in the family
should have the disease at one time in order to " save
trouble " as it is termed. This is a thoughtless and cruel
proceeding, as the concentration of the poison arising from
the simultaneous occurrence of several cases in one house or
room can hardly fail to have an injurious effect on the little
patients, and many of those who succumb to the disease in
early infancy might have escaped with their lives if they had
been more carefully shielded from contagion until after they
had passed the age of five or six years.
Bronchitis caused a larger number of deaths than usual,
although the mean temperature of the air during the winter
months was considerably above the average. Three or four
dense fogs and a few cold nights cause inflammatory affections
of the respiratory organs which continue to affect our
mortality for several weeks.
As the summer months were unusually cold we escaped
with much less than the average amount of infantile
Diarrhœa.
POPULATION.
The revised Census Tables show that the number of
inhabited houses in the parish on the 4th day of April, 1881,
was 11,083, an d the number of inhabitants 86,652. These
figures are rather higher than those given in my last Reports
but the difference is too small to affect the number of persons
per acre (138) or the average number of persons per house
(7.8). The density of the population is 88,500 persons per
square mile. The population at the middle of the year is
estimated at 87,430, which is 950 below the natural increase
of the population by the excess of births over deaths. There
is no doubt a margin of fluctuation, more or less, which is
dependent on the state of trade and the prosperity of various
industries, but we have no means of determining its extent.
BIRTHS.
The number of births registered was 3485, of which 1769
were males and 1716 were females. The births were 95
fewer than in the previous year. The annual birth-rate was
39.8 per 1000 of the estimated population. This is a lower