Mr. President,—It is in response to your invitation that I venture to submit to this Faculty a paper on the Influence of Occupation on Mortality. I have no fresh statistical observations to lay before you, but the task I have set myself is to elaborate the observations set out in the Supplement to the Registrar-General of England and Wales' Sixty-fifth Report, part II., a report which was published early this year. That report may rightly be described as the most important contribution to our knowledge of the subject which has yet been published, and it is thanks to the excellent tabulation of facts in it that I am able to deal further with them.

Before asking your attention to the subject proper of my paper, an examination of the results of the recent English study, I desire briefly to describe previous statistical observations on the subject, to indicate to you some of the difficulties and limitations in drawing satisfactory conclusions from these studies, and to explain the methods which have previously been used to overcome these difficulties, and methods which I now use for the first time.