1866. J CARPENTER — ON VITAL STATISTICS. 135 



tions. Such a glaring inaccuracy in a work executed at consider- 

 able expense, and demanding the greatest care to make it of 

 practical value, is not calculated to raise the character of the 

 Canadian Executive ; and throws considerable doubt on the value 

 of the returns in general. Evidence is given in the ' Second Re- 

 port of the Financial and Departmental Commission,' Feb. 1864, 

 pp. 32 et seq., that " the irregularities in the returns themselves 

 resulted from the ignorance of many of the enumerators as to the 

 object of the different columns ; and carelessness in leaving some of 

 them blank, or filling them in a manner that was manifestly absurd. 

 Where the addition of several columns should have agreed with the 

 total given in some other column, it often happened that irreconcil- 

 able differences occurred. . . . Some mode of bringing these 

 totals into harmony was necessary ; and an arbitrary system of what 

 I must call cooking the figures was resorted to for the purpose." 



The returns for Montreal City are said to have been made with 

 the greatest attainable accuracy ; yet the deaths for the year are 

 only stated as 2,038, while we know that 3,181 interments actual- 

 ly took place during the year at the two cemeteries, being a differ- 

 ence of 1,143, or more than 50 per cent. If it be supposed that 

 this marvelous discrepancy arose from a different division of the 

 year, the fact remains that the interments for 1860 were 3,171, 

 and for 1862, 3,461 ; in neither case presenting a perceptibly 

 lower rate. 



If such be the manifest and gigantic untruth in the returns of 

 the two largest cities of British America, it is hard to place any 

 reliance on returns of places of less importance, least of all of 

 country districts. Even if the figures had been accurately given, 

 they would only have established facts for a single year, which 

 might have exceptional : as it is, they must only be accepted for 

 comparative, not for absolute results. Such as they are, they are 

 presented in the following table, where the first two columns A and 

 B give the actual population and mortality. Column C presents 

 the average deaths among each thousand of the population. Column 

 D shews the number of deaths, out of every hundred from all 

 causes, which were due to xymotic diseases. When this propor- 

 tion is permanently high, it is a sure sign of bad air outside or 

 within the dwelling, or of polluted water: where it is exceptionally 

 high (as, apparently, in Ottawa, Laval, Vaudreuil, Soulanges and 

 Laprairie) it betokens an epidemic, which is probably due to 

 cumulative corruptions : where it is remarkably low, it may be 



