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CHAP. III Tables I have constructed my diagram (IV.), combining the two latter diseases for simplicity, and including the period of compulsory vaccination and accurate registration in both countries.

The most interesting feature of this diagram is the striking difference in the death-rates of the two countries. Scotland, the richer, more populous, and more prosperous country having a much greater mortality, both from the two zymotics and from small-pox, than poor, famine-stricken, depopulated Ireland. The maximum death-rate by the two zymotics in Scotland is considerably more than double that in Ireland, and the minimum is larger in the same proportion. In small-pox the difference is also very large in the same direction, for although the death-rate during the great epidemic in 1872 was only one-fourth greater in Scotland, yet as the epidemic there lasted three years, the total death-rate for those years was nearly twice as great as for the same period in Ireland, which, however, had a small epidemic later on in 1878. Since 1883 small-pox has been almost absent from both countries, as from England; but taking the twenty years of repeated epidemics from 1864 to 1883, we find the average small-pox death-rate of Scotland to be about 139, and that of Ireland 85 per million, or considerably more than as three to two. But even Scotland had a much lower small-pox mortality than England, the proportions being as follows for the three years which included the epidemic of 1871–3:

Ireland, 800 per million in the three years.

Scotland, 1,450 per million in the three years.

England, 2,000 per million in the three years.

Now the Royal Commissioners make no remark whatever on these very suggestive facts, and they have arranged the information in tables in such a way as to render it very difficult to discover them; and this is another proof of their incapacity to deal with statistical questions. They seem to be unable to