Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/542

 New Mexico, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia; the Western—Arizona, British Columbia, California, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington. This is a somewhat arbitrary division, but it will serve the purpose.

Taking the statistics of 1881, we find the membership, deaths, and rate per 100 in these several groups to have been as follows:

The apparent conclusion from this table would be that, while in the Eastern, Central, and Western sections the rate did not range very far from the general average, in the Northern it was very much below, and in the Southern very much above. Is this variation characteristic of the localities, or is it due to some special feature of the membership whose experience is tabulated? We find that in the Northern group of States and Provinces the rate is about thirty per cent below the average. But in this section the society is comparatively young; many of its branches have only been in existence a few years; and the membership is composed largely of men in the prime of life, or of those who have but recently passed some test of physical soundness. This might account for the lower rate of mortality. In the Southern section, while there are quite a few old branches, yet in many parts they are as young as in the North—the society having, like all others, suffered by the civil war, and having begun anew during the last fifteen years. We might reasonably expect, therefore, that the rate in the South, though above the average reported, is yet below the actual rate of the locality.

In order to obtain the true death-rate of the average adult male population, it is necessary to confine our investigations, if possible, to those branches which have been in existence for at least the life of one generation; and which will, therefore, contain their just proportion of aged persons. For the year 1881 the statistics were collected of 425 branches in different States, which had been in existence for not less than thirty-five years. In these, with a membership of 51,452, there were 655 deaths, or 1·27 per 100.

It is not possible from the returns to give anything like a correct average for each State or province, or even for each of the groups previously defined. In some States the membership of the older lodges is too small to give results that could form the basis of a correct estimate; but, by grouping some of the States in a geographical classification, we may calculate the average of certain sections. Thus