BILLS OF MORTALITY are abstracts from pa rish registers, showing, as their name imports, the numbers that have died in any pariah or place during certain periods of time, as in each week, month, or year ; and are, accordingly, denominated weekly, monthly, or yearly bills. They also include the num .
bers of the baptisms during the same periods, and generally those of the marriages.
What has been advanced on this subject, under the head MORTALITY, BILLS OF, in the appears to have been taken from Dr trona en Reversionary Payments ; and is designed principally, to explain the method of constructing Tables of Mortality from such Bills, which shall ex hibit the law according to which human life wastes at every age, and shah enable us to determine readi ly, the probability of its continuance from any one age to anyother ; a subject which will be treated in this Sement under the head MORTALITY, LAW OF.
The objects of the present article are these :.— • First, to give a brief history of the principal things that have been done in this way, which may suffice for such as are not disposed to go further into the subject, and may, at the same time, indicate-the best sources of information to those who take more inte rest in it.
As both mortuary registers and enumerations of • the people are much more valuable when combined than when separate, we shall also notice some of the principal enumerations, the results of which have been published. We shall then point out some of the principal defects in most of the published regi sters and enumerations ; and, lastly, shall submit some forms, according to which, if enumerations be made, and registers kept, they will be easily convertible to useful purposes.
The ancients do not appear to have kept any exact mortuary registers, at least no account of any regi sters•f that kind, with the ages of the deceased, have come down to us ; and although, in the Roman Cen sus. first established by SERVIIIS Turaaus, both the ages and sexes of the people were distinguished, we have no exact account of these particulars in any one of their enumerations.
Indeed, the principal object of the census among that warlike people, was the levying of men and money for the purposes of conquest; the duration of human life appears to have occupied very little of their attention, and their proficiency in the science of quantity was not sufficient either to show them what the necessary data were, or to enable them to draw just inferences from them, had they been in their possession.
A good account of what the ancient Romans did in this way, with references to the original authori ties, may be found in the Italian translation of M. Demoivre's Treatise qf Annuities on Lives, by Gaeta and Fontana, which was published at Milan, in 8vo, in the year 1776. (Discomo Preliminare, Parte 2.) The keeping of parish registers commenced in Englaed in the year 1538, in consequence of an in junction issued in that year by Thomas Cromwell, who, after the abolition of the Pope's authority in this kingdom, in the reign of Henry VIII., had been appointed the King's vicegerent in ecclesiastical af fairs.
Some parish registers in Germany appear to have commenced with the sixteenth century ; and in the Giittliche Ordneng of Sileemilch (T. S. S. 234, we are informed, that at the time of Lord Cromwell', injunction, they had already old registers of that kind, both at Augsburgh and Breslaw. However, the extracts he has given from the Augsburgh re gisters do not go back further than the year 1501, nor those for Breslaw beyond 1555. About the be ginning of the seventeenth century, such registers appear to have been established in most parts of Eu rope ; but it was not until the year 1662 that they began to attract public notice, and to be considered as the sources of valuable and interesting informa tion. In that year, John Graunt, a citizen of Lon don (afterwards an officer in the trained bands of the city, and a Fellow of the Royal Society), publish ed his Natural and Political Observations on the Bills e Mortality, principally those for London. The London bills, or accounts of baptisms and burials, appear to have been occasioned by the plague, and to have been begun in the year 1592, a time of great mortality. They were afterwards discontinued, but were resumed in 1603, after the great plague of that year. They have ever since been continued weekly, and an annual bill also has been regularly published. In 1629, the number of deaths by the different dis eases and casualties, were first inserted in them, also the distinction of the sexes ; and these have been continued ever since. But it is in the totals only of the baptisms and burials that the sexes are distin guished in these bills. They do not show how many of each sex died of each disease, neither have they, since 1728, when the distinction of the ages of the dead was first introduced, shown how many of each sex died in each interval of age, but only the total number of both sexes.