The number inscribed upon each department in the annexed map refers to the numbers of the table subjoined, which table indicates the average proportion of crimes with the population-the different degrees of shade correspond with the number of crimes represented. Thus in this map sents the maximum of crime, i. e. one person accused out of every 2,199 inhabitants. The the department of Corsica (No. 1), of which the tint is the darkest, precrime, i. e. one person accused out of every 37,014 inbabitants.

18,006 81 Côte d'Or.

18,070 82 Indre.

32,256

32,404

18,355 83 Somme

33 592

18,400 84 Sarthe.

33,913

18,642 85 Ardennes.

35,203

18,642 86 Creuse.

37,014

In estimating the influence of instruction, Monsieur Guerry takes as the test of education, the list of those returned to the minister of war at the period of conscription, as able to read and write; and making use of the five divisions I have mentioned, he compares the maps which paint the state of instruction with those which depict the state of crime. From this comparison we see, that while the crimes against persons are the most frequent in Corsica, the provinces of the south-east, and Alsace, where the people are well instructed, there are the fewest of those crimes in Berry, Limousin, and Brittany, where the people are most ignorant.

Such is the case with respect to crimes against the person. As for crimes against property, it is almost invariably those departments that are the best informed which are the most criminal. Should M. Guerry not be altogether wrong, then, this must appear certain—that if instruction do not increase crime, which may be a matter of dispute, there is no reason to believe that it diminishes it. But the fact is, that neither by the mea-sure adopted by M. Guerry, nor by any measure that we could adopt, is there any possibility of arriving statistically at the real value of instruction.

Under the denomination of persons "able to read and write," are those who read in spelling, and perpetrate an undecypherable scrawl, under the inspection of a village schoolmaster, and those who have received all the advantages of a scholastic and liberal education. "Writing and reading," the lowest grade of acquisition to one man, the highest to another-important I admit, when possessed to a degree that affords an easy access to knowledge, almost useless when it is merely taken to describe a difficult and machinal movement of the lips and fingers-is an absurd and ridiculous definition, thus indiscriminately selected, of the mental state of a district. That province which possesses but two hundred persons able to read and write, may have twice as many of all the advantages and the feelings conferred by education spread over it-as may be found in another province containing four hundred of these readers and writers. Besides, even supposing, which we do not suppose, that a man taken from Brittany writes just as good a hand, reads with quite as much facility, as a man taken from Provence, and that both these scholars can only read and