counteract differences which may exist in the populations from which the doctors sample. In a medical inspection of children in a large town, N., two doctors worked together; one examined all the boys, the other all the girls, and the one doctor showed results which indicated that the boys of this town were fine wellnourished children, whereas the other doctor's results showed a population of girls, the sisters of the boys examined by the other doctor, who were poor, weak, illnourished specimens. The two doctors had not originally compared their methods of judging nutrition by both examining separately the same sample of children.

This paper has been published with the view of emphasising the national importance of standardising the judgments of the School Medical Officers of different localities. Without this standardisation it is impossible to judge of the relative welfare of the school population in rural and in urban districts, or in urban districts with different dominant manufactures. It is not too strong a judgmentsweeping as it may seem to be-to assert that at the present day all conclusions drawn from the reports of the chief School Medical Officers are of no value for comparative purposes. This is not those officers' fault; their work is so arduous that they are bound to do much of it by deputy, and the present statistical training provided for candidates for diplomas of public health is so inadequate that many assistant School Medical Officers have not the least idea of the importance of standardisation, and even if they had, and could aim at it among their colleagues in one locality, there is at present no provision, whatever, made for a national standardisation in school inspection. The divergencies indicated in this paper would disappear with a proper local standardisation, but we should be left with what is of still greater importance from the national standpoint: the intra-district want of standardisation would disappear, but the inter-district divergencies would remain to confuse all national administrators. This problem of national standards quite as important as those of weight and length-is one so urgent that we may well hope that the youngest of all the ministries is not yet too old to carry through some adequate measure of reform, while it has youth and freshness for this necessary but undoubtedly difficult task.

APPENDIX.-NUMERICAL TABLES.

The following tables give the data upon which the discussions in this memoir are based. It has been considered desirable to publish them as they will bring more clearly before the statistical reader the difficulties which arise in the treatment of the material.