176 PRESIDENTS ADDRESS—SECTION H. 
together, by Mr. A. F. Burridge, F.LA. Ihave not seen the 
original paper, but the table is apparently constructed from the 
deaths registered during the 12 years 1870 to 1881, and the census 
enumerations of 1871 and 1881 (assisted in Queensland by the 
enumeration of 1886), the age-distribution for intervening years 
being calculated. With the aid of the result Mr. Coghlan, like 
his conjréres, draws comparisons between the expectation of life 
in these provinces of Australia and in other parts of the world, 
which are very flattering to the former. But, without going to 
the very bottom of the calculation, and there is much to be dug 
up thence and anxiously scrutinised in all countries in which 
decennial censuses are the rule, what is a life-table designed to 
do? Is it not designed to ascertain the after life-time at ages of 
a particular race living under particular conditions? The 
possibility of constructing a life-table for a population which 
increases by immigration as does that of Australia may well be 
questioned ; but apart from that, of what value is such a table to 
Australia, or to the world, from which the racial or national or 
Australian element is absent, or in which it is present only in 
unrecognisable form and inappreciable amount? Are not all 
these coniparisons between unlike things, and all these methods 
which use elaborate and hazardous calculations to supply the 
place of observable but neglected facts, distinctively unscientific ? 
Direct observation of the fact, patient accumulation of recorded 
fact, self-restraint from speculation until the body of accumulated 
fact is sufficient to warrant induction, and, last of all, zwduction 
with aid of whatever mathematical formule may then seem useful 
—these are the essential conditions of experimental enquiry. In 
relation to vital statistics we neglect them at present, or make 
little more than a show of observing them. 
Having now indicated the quality of the results which our 
modes of enumeration and registration furnish, and the practically 
futile character of some of the calculations, comparisons, and 
inferences which are based upon them, I proceed to touch upon 
the second branch of the topic which I mentioned at first. This 
is the use of the same set of observations (or of part of them) for 
the immediate purposes of practical sanitation. And just as 
record of the duration of life is the leading feature of the data 
from which it is proposed to deduce the vitality of a nation, so 
accurate record of the cause of death is the leading feature of the 
register which is used to give direction to sanitary organisations. 
But upon this essential point—accurate return of causes of death— 
I need not speak ; most of us have already fully considered it in 
relation to the organisation at present sanctioned by our Govern- 
ments, and most of us are of opinion that the returns the latter 
yields are in this respect seriously open to question. I therefore 
merely insert in a note some facts which are sufficiently suggestive. 
