REGISTRAR-GENERAL'S ANNUAL REPORT.'

THE annual Reports which bear the signature of the Registrar- General of Births, Deaths, and Marriages are distinguished in themselves for considerable interest in their subjects and treat- ment, and by much variety from each other. Of course there is a certain limitation beyond which the author cannot pass. He must deal with life, death, and marriage, in the gross not in the individual—in the statistical, not in the social or storied point of view. Much, however, that bears upon the fortunes or well- being of mankind has been elicited, though in a matter-of-fact way : how prices operate upon marriages and deaths, how epide- mic disease varies with the social condition and habitat of people, and similar topics. Nor have the inquiries and deductions of Dr. Farr been limited to questions of a large or abstract kind, which if to be directly dealt with, can only be dealt with by public au-

thority. His investigations into the value, that is the average duration of life—which demonstrate the too high premiums that life-insurance offices have been in the habit of charging on select lives—is one of the most available examples of statistical science, directed to a practical end, which the present day can furnish.

The Sixteenth Report—dealing with 1853, the year before the war—points out, as usual, the most noticeable features in the life statistics of the year. In spite of wheat rising from 446. 6d. a quarter in the spring to 69s. 10d. in the last three months, marriages flourished. The usual proportion of persons marrying is sixteen to a thousand ; in 1853 it was nearly eighteen (17-88.) Of the marriages, 84 per cent were solemnized in the Established Church, and only 16 per cent in other places. In the marriages for the year, 114,537 husbands and 92,316 wives wrote their names. The husbands who made " marks " were 49,983, the wives 72,201. The relative percentage of those who could not, or at least who did not write their names, was 30 per cent among the men and 43 among the women. London displayed by far the largest proportion of " schollards "-87 per cent among men and

77 among women signed the registry. The men and women of Wales (and Monmouthshire) write their names in the lowest pro- portions."

"The ten counties in which the greatest proportion of men wrote their names are—Durham 72.1, Gloucester 72-2, Lincoln 72.8, Devon 73.6, Sus- sex 73.8, York (East [tiding) 77.6, Northumberland 79.2, York (North Riding) 79.4, Cumberland 82.9, Westmoreland 85.4.

"The system of instruction and the habits of these people must be very different from those of the people in the ten following English counties, where instruction is at the lowest ebb : Cambridgeshire 60-6, Shropshire 58.5, Buckinghamshire 58.4, Norfolk 58.1, Essex 57-5, Suffolk 561, Bed- fordshire 551, Staffordshire 53.8, Huntingdonshire 51.9, Hertfordshire 49.6.

"Thus, in parts of England, the educational system of the country has been so narrowly based, and is so imperfect, that 5 in ten of the men who marry, cannot write their names.

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"Two questions are raised on these signatures : is the man or the woman who signs with a mark unable to write ? are the men or the women who write their names, able to write anything else ? Some men and women who can write imperfectly, do undoubtedly sign with marks. Upon the other hand, some persons can write their names who cannot write a letter or keep an account in writing. The former clue is perhaps the most nume- rous. Some of the 30 men, some of the 44 women, who sign with marks can write their names. Some of the 70 men and the 56 women who write their names, write little else ; and are evidently unpractised writers, as their signatures are often almost illegible ; not the flourishesof penmanship in which some men conceal the letters of their name, nor the undecipher- able scrawl in which others write, but the uncouth, ill-formed letters of men and women who have never advanced at school beyond the first rudi- ments."

The subject of surnames, which may be said to give the feature to the Report, is one that has been occasionally handled by anti- quaries, especially by Mr. Lower, but not with such command over national materials as the indexes of the Office give to Dr. Farr. Whatever be the paucity of invention in r,eourd to London streets, where so many Cambridge, Cumberland, Wellington, and Waterloo Places, figure without any conceivable appropriateness, there is no lack of variety in English surnames.

"The most striking circumstance presented by the indexes is the extra- ordinary number and variety of the surnames of the English people. De- rived from almost every imaginable object, from the names of places from trades and employments, from personal peculiarities, from the Christian name of the father' from objects in the animal and vegetable kingdoms, from things animate and inanimate, their varied character is as remarkable as their singularity is often striking. Some of the terms which swell the list are so odd and even ridiculous that it is difficult to assign any satis- factory reason for their assumption in the first instance RS family names, unless indeed, as has been conjectured, they were nicknames or sobriquets, which neither the first bearers nor their posterity could avoid. "In Wales, however, the surnames, if surnames they can be called, do not present the same variety, most of them having been formed in a simple manner from the Christian or forename of the father in the genitive case, son being understood. Thus Evan's son became Evans,' John's son, Jones,' &c. Others were derived from the father's name coalesced with a form of the word ap or hab (son of), by which Hugh ap Howell became Evan ap Hugh became 'Pugh'; ; and in like manner were formed nearly all the Welsh surnames beginning with the letters B and P. Here- ditary surnames were not in use even amongst the gentry of Wales until the tune of Henry VIII., nor were they generally established until a much later period ; indeed, at the present day they can scarcely be said to be adopted amongst the lower classes in the wilder districts, where as the mar- riage register shows, the Christian name of the father still frequently be- comes the patronymic of the son in the manner just described.'

An appendix contains a list of some fifteen hundred peculiar names. The aggregate numbers of fifty of the most common sur- names have been drawn from certain of the indexes so as to give a fair notion of their national proportions. It is satisfactory to observe that the far-famed Smith heads the list. The descend- 'Sixteenth Annual Report of the Begistrar-Getteral of Births, Deaths, and Marriages in .,gland. Printed for Her Majesty's Stationery Mice.

ants of those useful sons of Vulcan stand at 33,557. Somewhat lower in number, but yet "where one step higher would set him highest," comes the equally familiar Jones whose tribe amounts to 33,341. Brown, only 14,346, stands below Williams 21,936, Taylor 16,775, and Davies 14,983. Robinson, poor fellow! is no- where—'.a paltry 9045 is all he can muster. Thomas beats him hollow; so does Evans ; Roberts is well ahead; and even the sons of John (Johnson) leave the sons of Robin more than four hun- dred behind.

Except in special and rare cases, surnames were not used by the Anglo-Saxons ; they came in with the Conquest. Of the fifty names in the list, twenty-seven are classed as derived from Christian or forenames • thirteen from occupations ; seven from locality—so that Mr. Hall is a feudal gentleman with a nom de terre ; two from personal peculiarities—

Brown 14,346 White 7,808.

One house is named "from other circumstances "- King 5661; whose family claims must have arisen before the Royal Marriage Act. The derivation of names from the Christian or forename is not always obvious : that from occupation is clearer.

"After the Smiths come the Taylors Who are about half as numerous as the Smiths ; next the Wrights, amounting to about half the number of the Taylors; then the Walkers, Turners, Clarks, Coopers, Wards, Bakers, and Clarkes. The Clarks and the Clarkes, if taken collectively, would occupy the third place in the list of names derived from employments; a fact which points significantly to the importance attached to the clerkly office, and to the possession of a moderate amount of learning, in rude and un- lettered times, when a king received his characteristic epithet (Beau-dere) from his scholarship. This class of surnames is peculiarly instructive as illustrating the pursuits and customs of our forefathers ; many of them furnish evidence of a state of society impressed with the characteristics of feudal times ; and not a few are derived from terms connected with the amusements of the chace and other field-sports to which our ancestors were so ardently attached. Widely different would bo a national nomenclature derived from the leading occupations of the present day. The thousands employed in connexion with the great textile manufactures would take pre- cedence even of the Smiths; while the Taylors would give place to the Shoemakers, i (now scarcely recognizable under the not common surname of Suter, with its variations Solider, Sowter, &c.,) as well as to the Colliers, the Carpenters, the Farmers, and others. The Hawkers, Falltoners, Bowyers, Fletchers, Arrowsmiths,Pahners, Pilgrims, Friars or Freres, and a host of other family names derived from various callings which have become obso- lete in this country, would be wanting."

We will close with a view of the positive and proportional numbers of the great and rival houses of Smith and Jones.

"The surname of Smith is preeminently the most common in England, as that of Jones is in Wales ; and so great is the multitude of the Welsh Joneses, that the latter name not only enters into competition for priority in point of numbers with the Smiths, but in several years shows a majority over its rival. With a view to determine the relative frequeucy of these two widely-spread surnames, I have ascertained the numbers of each entered in the indexes during the years 1838-'51. The result is, that the births, deaths, and marriages of the Smiths registered in this period, were 286,037, and those of the Joneses 282,900, the excess in favour of the former being 3137 in the 17 years. Smith is, therefore, unquestionably the most common surname amongst us, although the Joneses are little less numerous and in six of the years actually contributed to the registers larger numbers than the Smiths. Together, the bearers of these two common mines amounted to 568,937, or 1 in 36 of the whole number registered during the period referred to. "Assuming that the persons of the surnames of Smith and Jones are born, marry, and die i the same proportions as persons of all surnames, it will follow that in England and Wales there are not less than half-a-million of persons bearing one or other of those two surnames. The Smiths amount to rather more than a quarter of a million, and the Joneses to little less ; together forming no inconsiderable portion of the English population. These numbers represent, on the assumption that the average number of persons in a family is the same as in the whole population at the census, viz. 41 persons, about 53,000 families of Smiths, and 51,000 families of Joneses ; and to give an illustration of their numerical power, it may be stated that these two great tribes are probably sufficiently numerous to people the four towns of Birmingham, Bristol, Leeds, and Hull, without any addi- tion of persons of other surnames."