BIRTH'S, MARRIAGES, AND DEATHS, THE salient points of man's existence
are birth, marriage, and death : he comes into the world and goes out of it—and in the interim either marries or fails to get married. On these three points hre concentrated all the interest other people take in him,— as witnesteall our standard plays and novels, the "births, mar- riages, and deaths," in every newspaper, and a journal lately started for the sole and exclusive purpose of cultivating and dis- serftinating sound views of this branch of human knowledge.
Men of science, who deal in abstractions, whose business is 'with essentials, dismissing all accidents from their severe cogita- tions, have discovered that these three events are what give form and substance to the life of every individual. "Given a man's birth, marriage, (or non-marriage,) and his death, all the rest of his career that there is any use in knowing may be inferred from these data." Biography- and history are for artists and gossips : the philosophers of our day take note of a man's birth, marriage,' and death, as their predecessors did of the minute and planetary conjunctions under which these events happened ; and the ob- servations of the " statists " are as instructive and infallible as those- of 'the " astrologers." A committee of our modern philosophers have, under the auspices of Parliament and at the public expense, just given to the world a huge blue book containing profound calculations on their brief abstracts of human life. The Sixth Annual Report of the Registrar of Births, Deaths, and Marriages, conveys as much information respecting man and his destiny as can be obtained by subjecting a certain number of abstractions who have under- tone the processes of birth, death, and marriage, all duly classi- fied, to the crucible or the alembic of logarithms, until they have been sublimed into ratios. Everything of mere human or indi- vidual interest is carefully eliminated, and the results are philo- sophy of the most transcendental kind.
Different classifications have been adopted of the persons born, married, and dead ; just as the grub, chrysalis, and butterfly, may be supposed in the different stages of its existence to belong to different sub-genera of its class. The persons born are arranged 'under two categories—male and female ; the classes of the per- sons married are more numerous—Churchmen Congregational- ists, Presbyterians Calvinistic and Arminian 'Methodists, Mora- vians, Jews, &c. ; Presbyterians, classes of the dead are equally numerous, though differently denominated—husbandmen, jewellers, potboys, soldiers, cabmen, noblemen, &c. It is necessary to bear in mind this peculiar method, lest we should fall into the error of sup- posing that though all males and females are born, none but 'sectaries marry, and none but professional persons (noblemen, for example and potboys) die. To show the importance of the results of this new way of Studying man in the abstract, a few specimensmaybe subjoined. The loves of i
the Dissenters are decidedly on the increase: the marriages -of members of the Church in 1842 were 4,324 fewer than in 1841, while the marriages "not according to the rites of the Established Church" had increased 658. In the Metropolis the ratio of persons coming irregularly into the world was lower than in any other part of the country, and the ratio of persons ,going irregularly out of it higher. The number of deaths "by the visitation of God" has decreased, and a number of deadly diseases unknown to the bills of mortality have been introduced- " by railways," "by machinery," and by falls of earth and Stone." Among the suicides are 100 labourers, and only 16 noblemen-and-persons of property : of the labourers, 79 put an end to themselves by hanging, (an illustration of the folly of -making that a punishment which men inflict upon themselves of 'Choice); the noblemen and persons of property preferred guns tend sharp weapons. The suicidal potboys were few in number, and only one lawyer committed this folly. Nine-medical- maw are `classed among the suicides ; 'but as seven died of -poison, it is -possible that they swallowed their own prescriptions by mistake.