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The article attempts to estimate the expectancy chances of an individual being hospitalized for a mental disease at least once in England and Wales. The estimation can be done by using two types of empirical information and one general assumption. The empirical information is age specific hospitalization rates during a particular year. The chances of an individual, of 0 age reaching the ages of 10, 11 and 12. Both pieces of empirical information are available from official sources. The Registrar General publishes an abridged life table, which gives existing death rates, and estimates the numbers of children aged under 1 year likely to survive to various ages up to 75 plus. Rates of first hospitalization are calculated in the reports not for particular years, but for different age groups. Survival rates will be calculated on numbers reaching the upper limit of the age group, and hospitalization rates will be assessed by the rates for the age group multiplied by the number of years in the age group. The results suggest that 6.79 percent of males born in 1959 and 10.33 per cent of females will spend some time in a mental hospital during their lives.

Birth data obtained from the parish records of the City of York, England show a markedly bi-modal seasonal distribution in the sixteenth century. It appeared interesting to compare the expectation of life of individuals born during this period, during the two minimal and two maximal seasons, to determine if there was any adaptive significance in the annual variation of birth rate. No such effect could be established by this study. However, certain conclusions of considerable interest can be drawn. The survivorship functions for either sex, grouped by birth season or on the whole group, are of a rectilinear diagonal type more reminiscent of an avian population rather than man. However the York data were treated, no statistically significant difference appeared between the sexes when their expectation of life was compared, and the female death rate at all times until the end of life was somewhat higher than the male. It appeared that sixteenth-century York tended to care better for their sons than for their daughters, which also appears to be the case in some modern societies of low to moderate living standard.