THE UNIFORMITY OF SOCIAL PHENOMENA. 811 



may remember other men who have died in the flower of their youth. 

 All these things seem to us accidental and unaccountable ; but social 

 physiology shows that they, as well as other human movements, are 

 governed by fixed and irrevocable laws. 



We might expect some regularity in the rates of births and deaths, 

 for these are necessarily conformable to the laws of Kature ; but there 

 is something to cause surprise in the fixedness of the rates, and the 

 regular grouping of the various conceivable cases. It is also a curious 

 fact that not only do a certain number of children come to each popu- 

 lation year after year, but that the nativity figure also forms a char- 

 acteristic trait of individual nations, and that in any particular course 

 of years, when the regularity is not disturbed by any external cause, 

 like a war or an epidemic, it hardly varies by a decimal part. This 

 regularity extends even to the proportion of those who are born of 

 either sex, the general average of which is expressed by the numbers — 

 100 girls to 105-38, or, including still-born, 106'31 boys ; and if this 

 proportion is disturbed in any one year, it is almost certain to be made 

 up in the following year. 



International statistics show also a remarkable steadiness in the 

 proportions characteristic of different countries of legitimate and ille- 

 gitimate births, of quick and still-born, of twins, triplets, etc., which 

 the complications often prevailing in the combinations only bring more 

 clearly to light. 



The same regularity is manifested in the death-rates, in which, 

 whether we take long or short periods of time, the deviations from the 

 fixed average are very slight ; and all the acquisitions of modern civ- 

 ilization, with the great improvements that have been made in medical 

 science and its applications, have not yet effected a material prolonga- 

 tion of the average of human life. 



If any fundamental social fact is voluntary it is marriage ; yet the 

 ratio of marriages to the population is in most countries even more 

 constant than that of deaths. The same regularity prevails in the pe- 

 culiar features of the marriages ; the same proportions of the marry- 

 ing pairs are constituted of both single persons, widows and bachelors, 

 widowers and spinsters, or both widowed. A curious uniformity pre- 

 vails in the matter of disparity of ages, and other exceptional feat- 

 ures, and finally of separations and divorced persons, of second, third, 

 and more numerously repeated marriages. Each country has its own 

 times of year or months when the most marriages take place. T4iey 

 are February and November in France, Austria, and Italy ; May in 

 Holland and Belgium ; November and December in Sweden and Nor- 

 way ; and the fewest marriages take place in March, July, and August 

 in France, Italy, Belgium, and the Netherlands ; in August and De- 

 cember in Austria. 



The intellectual qualities of a people do not lend themselves to 

 measurement so readily as do the concrete peculiarities we have no- 



