that the reader is entitled to a more detailed statement of their extent and method before he is ready to accept them as final vindications of the author's contentions.

One more quotation: On page 441, the author, speaking of the social discrimination practiced in this country against the Jews, as witnessed by the refusal of certain hotels and schools to accept Jews as guests or pupils, asserts that "the isolation of the Jew is in this repsect as stringent as it was within the gates of the medieval Ghetto." We can not refrain from remarking that, humiliating as such discriminations are to the members of the Jewish race, the above is a gross overstatement of their efficacy and importance.

To sum up, the book, which undoubtedly contains much of value, needs a careful scrutiny of the statistical evidence and the elimination of all that is not strictly accurate; it needs a careful revision to avoid misleading statements and ill-considered reasoning; and, finally, it needs to be purged of all bias and exaggeration before it can be accepted as a real contribution to the scientific literature on the Jews.

Washington, D. C.

E. A. GOLDENWEISER.

THE AMERICAN YEAR BOOK.

D. Appleton and Company, New York. 1911. Pp. xx, 867.

The first issue of the American Year Book fully justifies the enterprise of the publishers. It is unique in plan, comprehensive in its scope, authoritative and accurate in the matter it presents, and characterized throughout by good sense, both in what is included and in what is excluded. All this might have been predicated in advance of a work in the preparation of which so many men eminent in their respective departments of knowledge took a part; over the details of which a wise advisory board presided; and the actual collation and arrangement of which was entrusted to the hand of Dr. S. N. D. North.

In effect the Year Book is a condensed annual encyclopedia. It contains substantially all that the ordinary man will wish to know when he is seeking for the "record of progress" in any field of politics, foreign affairs, science, education-in short, of anything which is worth knowing; and it outlines all that the student in any field will need to know in order to prosecute research further. That is all that can be expected of a manual upon the plan of this. Of course it does not displace and supersede all other annuals. The biggest and most comprehensive of all—a bigger and more comprehensive one than any now in existence could not contain all that every one would find sufficient. But it is high praise, and fully deserved, to say of this Year Book that those who have it at hand will be likely to turn to it first for any information they desire on any subject relative to the progress of the world during the period it covers.

It is not necessary to give a detailed summary of its contents. It is divided into thirty-five parts, each of which is contributed by one or more persons, and the list of contributors numbers more than ninety names. Thirty-two learned or technical societies coöperated, more or less, though all coöperated actively in the preparation of the matter. Nearly fifty of the contributors are professors or instructors in American universities and colleges, and the rest are experts-many of them, in the service of the national government-in the subjects treated by them. The arrangement of the book is admirable. By grouping all the matter relating to any one general topic in a single department, and by supplementing the whole work with an excellent index, the vexations often inevitable when one is consulting an annual handbook alphabetically arranged, are completely avoided.

EDWARD STANWOOD.

ANNUAL REPORT FOR 1909 OF THE CHIEF MEDICAL OFFICER OF THE BOARD OF EDUCATION (LONDON), 1910. 11d.

In 1907 the Education Act required each Local Education Authority to provide for the medical inspection of children immediately before, or at the time of, or as soon as possible after their admission to a public elementary school, and on such other occasions as the Board of Education direct. The Code for 1909-10 required that all children admitted since the first of August, 1909, and all children who were expected to leave school before July 31, 1910, should be examined with regard to the conditions of health and physical development. Perhaps this second group called "leavers" is the more important since it will tell the story of the practice or neglect of hygiene during school life and may determine certain questions of employment of the child. In addition they examined any children who were reported by the teachers to be in bad physical condition. It is probable that at least 250,000 of this special class were examined. To carry out this Act has required the examination of about a million and a half children. The provisions of the Act and the Code have been generally obeyed throughout the Kingdom with the exception of London.

Since the examinations were not uniform throughout the whole Kingdom it is difficult to give any statistics approaching absolute accuracy, but it may be stated in general terms that of the six million children in the public elementary schools of England and Wales, about 10 per cent. are defective in vision, from 3 per cent. to 5 per cent. defective in hearing, 8 per cent. have adenoids or enlarged tonsils of sufficient degree to require surgical treatment, from 20 per cent. to 40 per cent. suffer from extensive and injurious decay of the teeth, about 1 per cent. are affected with tuberculosis, and from one half per cent. to 2 per cent. are afflicted with heart disease. These figures certainly give a somewhat gloomy picture of the condition of the pupils in the elementary schools. No statistics on a large scale have

ever been gathered in this country so that it is impossible to introduce comparisons, but from the figures which are available in this country it is apparent that conditions among our public school children would well repay state-wide study. This report is filled with interesting studies of local conditions and gives a very good idea of the extent of the effort which is being made in England to insure to the country a healthy working population.

Yale University.

WM. B. BAILEY.

REPORT OF COMMITTEE ON STANDARD TABLES.

The undersigned members of a committee appointed at the last annual meeting of this Association to coöperate with a committee of the American Public Health Association to consider forms of tables employed in registration reports, federal, state, and municipal, and to draft a set of standard tables, have the honor to submit the following report of progress.

The form of statistical tables is dependent primarily upon the information which the tables are to convey. That information always consists in certain statistical totals combined in various ways. In American registration reports, as a class, the space given to tables regarding deaths greatly exceeds that given to all other tables. For this reason the present report is confined to mortality tables.

American registration of deaths is now based in nearly all cases upon a standard certificate. Hence the information open to tabulation is practically identical. Part of the information conveyed on a certificate is merely for identification or corroboration and has no statistical value. This is true regarding the decedent's name and that of the father and mother, the date of birth as distinguished from the age, the length of residence, the place and date of burial, and the name and address of the undertaker. After excluding these items, there remain for use in statistical tabulation the following:

(1) Place of death,

(2) Time of death;

as physical characteristics of the decedent:

(3) Sex,

(4) Age,

(5) Race or color,

(6) Cause of death;

as social or economic characteristics of the decedent:

(7) Birthplace,

(8) Birthplace of father,

(9) Birthplace of mother, (10) Marital condition,

(11) Occupation.

The deaths are thus susceptible of classification under each of these heads and each possible combination of them and the living population as reported by a census, or as estimated for other than census years, may be similarly classified. The proper classification of deaths is the primary object of all mortality tables in registration reports, the presentation of ratios between the annual deaths in a certain group and the enumerated or estimated living population in that group is the secondary object.

Tabulations with reference to a single characteristic seldom have much scientific or practical value. Thus, to know the number of females who died in 1910 or the number of persons who died of tuberculosis in that year is of little importance. But when the persons dying of tuberculosis are classified by sex, age, and occupation, and the living population is classified in the same way and rates computed, the results become significant. There is little use, then, in tabulating separately for each of the eleven characteristics previously mentioned. The tables should show combinations of these eleven in various ways. These combinations may be dual like sex and nativity; triple like sex, age, and occupation; quadruple like sex, age, occupation, cause of death, etc.

The extent of the tabulation of death statistics by registration states and cities and the manner of presenting the results of this tabulation are problems concerning primarily the registration offices. We may point out, however, that the meager and badly planned tables in many state and city reports are depriving the public of the sound and accurate knowledge of present conditions which is needed for the proper development of the public health campaign.

Your committee has had reason to believe that a series of standard tables which might be introduced in future reports of state and city offices as a supplement to or a substitute for those heretofore published would be welcomed in some quarters. Such tables also are demanded by the vote of the American Statistical Association appointing the committee.

In preparing these tables it is possible either to start with the present procedure of our states and cities and attempt to systematize it, or to disregard that experience and start afresh. Your committee believes that the former is the proper method and has therefore inquired, What combinations of statistical data are now presented? To secure an answer to this question the latest available registration reports of every registration state and of ten registration cities, selected on the basis of size and location, have been examined. New York State and South Dakota were disregarded because of the almost complete absence of classification of deaths in the reports of those states. The District of Columbia was treated as a state rather than as a city. This gives a total of sixteen registration states. Of these sixteen the number which tabulate the several items without combination is as follows:

The number of possible combinations of two items in a series of eleven is determined by a simple mathematical formula to be fifty-five. Of these the following are found most commonly in the sixteen registration states:

Of the fifty-five possible combinations of two items these nine are found in at least five of the sixteen states, eleven are found in from one to four states and thirty-five are not found in any state. As examples of dual classifications of deaths not now made in any registration state, the following may be named,- -a classification by sex and occupation, by sex and marital condition, by age and nativity, by occupation and race.

An examination of the tables published in the reports of the ten selected