disappear from England at so early a period and plague later on? Surely to some improved conditions of health. The Commissioners do not, and we may presume cannot, tell us why measles, of all the zymotic diseases, has rather increased than diminished during the whole of this century. Many students of epidemics hold that certain diseases are liable to replace each other, as suggested by Dr. Watt, of Glasgow, in the case of measles and small-pox. Dr. Farr, the great medical statistician, adopted this view. In his Annual Report to the Registrar-Greneral in 1872 (p. 224), he says: "The zymotic diseases replace each other; and when one is rooted out it is apt to be replaced by others which ravage the human race indifferently whenever the conditions of healthy life are wanting. They have this property in common with weeds and other forms of life: as one species recedes another advances." This last remark is very suggestive in view of the modern germ-theory of these diseases. This substitution theory is adopted by Dr. Creighton, who in his History of Epidemics in England suggests that plague was replaced by typhus fever and small-pox; and, later on, measles, which was insignificant before the middle of the seventeenth century, began to replace the latter disease. In order to show the actual state of the mortality from these diseases during the epoch of registration, I have prepared a diagram (II.) giving the death-rates for London of five of the chief zymotics, from the returns of the Registrar-Greneral, under the headings he adopted down to 1868—for to divide fevers into three kinds for half the period, and to separate scarlatina and diphtheria, as first done in 1859, would prevent any useful comparison from being made.
The lowest line, as in the larger diagram, shows Small-pox. Above it is Measles, which keeps on the whole a very level course, showing, however, the high middle period of the zymotics and two low periods, from 1869 to 1876, and from 1848 to 1856, the first nearly corresponding to the very high small-pox
