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89
ballast, or other hard material, to be approved by the District
Surveyor, well mixed with fresh burned lime or cement in the
proportion of one of lime to six, and one of cement to eight of
the other material. This by-law does not appear to have been
put into force until about 1894, and it is of course impossible to
say that it was strictly enforced in all houses built after that
date. On the supposition that this was the case, I have compared
the health of houses in North Woolwich which were
built before 1894, and that of houses built since, and the
following statistics are the result. They refer to the four years
1905-1908, with the exception of the notified births which are
for the period July, 1908, to June, 1909. The numbers are on
the whole small and therefore must be received with caution,
as it is a law of statistics that the smaller the numbers dealt
with the more liable they are to vary. But allowing for this,
the superiority of the death rates in the more recently built
houses is so marked that it can be safely taken as something
more than accidental. The death rate, infant death rate, and
diarrhoea mortality are all markedly lower. The births taken
are notified births. As all births are not notified this does not
represent the total number of births, but they may be safely
used for comparison of the two sets of houses, though the
infantile death rate in both sets of houses comes out higher
perhaps by 20 per cent. than is really the case.
The social condition of the people is much the same in both
the old and the new houses, so that it appears safe to attribute
the greater healthiness of the new houses to their structural
condition.
Wherever houses are found decidedly damp attempts are
made to secure concreting of the site, and the figures attached
show the importance of doing this.