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year after birth. Up to and including the fifth year of
age, there were 222 more deaths, making 912 in all
during the first quinquennial period, or very nearly half
the total mortality of the Hamlet for the year. The
690 deaths during the first year of age, constitute alone
more than one-third the total mortality.
This infantile mortality is certainly a subject for
reflection. Apart from congenital causes, a large
majority of these young lives would, under conditions
more favorable to existence, be preserved.
Many causes combine to produce this excessive mortality;
these may be, in many cases, through unavoidable
adverse circumstances, but they are often avoidable,
sometimes wilful, caused by ignorance in management,
improper and insufficient food; the same with regard
to clothing, exposure to cold, breathing impure air in
close, overcrowded rooms.
All these injurious influences, exerted upon the susceptible
organism of that early period of life,—not
having yet acquired sufficient vital force to resist their
effects—produce the necessary results, disease and great
mortality. I think the statistics and rate of mortality
in children, up to 5 years of age, should be kept, and
recorded separately from these for adults, the public
would then learn whence the principal cause of high
death-rates arises. Local autherities are comparatively
powerless to remedy or even mitigate many of these
evils. It is a social question of great magnitude, and,
if only upon grounds of humanity, should be worked
out, and as far as possible remedied. The Infant Life
Protection Act is an instalment of other necessary measures.
I have only been called upon to certify in respect
of one applicant for the care of children under this Act.
There are many and various causes affecting the
public health, but which are not amenable to the powers
possessed by the Health Autherity, but which are
more or less injurious or dangerous to health, and the