Page:Transactions of the Provincial Medical and Surgical Association, volume 2.djvu/168

 we have accurate records of the deaths in them, I see no reason why the statistical results supplied from them, in the Tables, may not be considered as affording a specimen of the true law of mortality and longevity of the district, when the health of the inhabitants is undisturbed by any other causes than those which attach to the simplest and purest condition of agricultural or rural life, that is, to as natural a state of life as the present form of society, in this country, will permit.

In these three parishes, the annual average number of deaths, for the eight years ending with 1820, was 34. This makes the proportion of deaths to the living, reckoning according to the census of 1821, only as 1 in 77; but, as the population of the three parishes was only 2117 in 1811, it will be more correct, in giving the proportion of deaths to the living, to take the mean of the population of the two periods of 1811 and 1821. This increases the annual proportion of deaths to I in 69. Even this, however, is very high, much higher than that of any place noticed in the tables.

It results from Table XXIV. that, in these parishes, a much smaller proportion of the inhabitants die in the first years of life, than in the other parts of the district; and that they, alone, exhibit a lesser degree of mortality than the Carlisle Tables, at this period of life. From Tables XXVII. and XXVIII. it results that one-half of the born attain the 50th year, and that exactly one-seventh reach beyond their 80th year. It is, indeed, in the very advanced period of life, in what is properly termed longevity, that the inhabitants of these parishes stand pre-eminent.