Page:1899 The Growth of Cities in the Nineteenth Century.djvu/45

Rh but in New England, where there are no other incorporated communities than the city, the township is the statistical unit. Obviously, this variation in practice destroys the comparability of urban statistics, since a township is large enough to contain several villages and a large number of scattered dwellings besides. The census returns should designate communities within the township.

The percentage of error in such cases will of course vary directly with the extent of territory and inversely with the number of inhabitants. Given a large township, there still may not be a single community or dwelling-centre of 2,000 population, although the entire township may contain 10,000 people. This is indeed an extreme case, though it can doubtless be parallelled in the statistics of Spain, where the dwelling centres are never separately returned. In Italy, where both the agglomerated population, or inhabitants of communities, and the total communal or township population are returned, important differences are found. Brescia township contained, in 1881, 60,630 inhabitants; Brescia,