at home or in a hospital.
There is also a column for the entry of persons speaking the Irish
language only or able to speak both that and English. In the report of
1901 for England and Wales (p. 170) a table is given showing, for the
three divisions of the United Kingdom, the relative number of persons
speaking the ancient languages either exclusively or in addition to
English.

_British Colonies and Dependencies._--A simultaneous and uniform census
of the British empire is an ideal which appeals to many, but its
practical advantages are by no means commensurate with the difficulties
to be surmounted. Scattered as are the colonies and dependencies over
the world, the date found most suitable for the inquiry in the mother
country and the temperate regions of the north is the opposite in the
tropics and inconvenient at the antipodes. Then, again, as to the scope
of the inquiry, the administrative purposes for which information is
thus collected vary greatly in the different countries, and the inquiry,
too, has to be limited to what the conditions of the locality allow, and
the population dealt with is likely to be able and willing to answer. By
prearrangement, no doubt, uniformity may be obtained in regard to most
of the main statistical facts ascertainable at a census, at all events
in the more advanced units of the empire, and proposals to this effect
were made by the registrar-general of England and Wales in his report
upon the figures for 1901. Previous to that date, the only step towards
compilation of the census results of the empire had been a bare
statement of area and population, appended without analysis; comparison
or comment, to the reports for England and Wales, from the year 1861
onwards. In 1905, however, the returns published in the colonial reports
were combined with those of the United Kingdom, and the subjects of
house-room, sex, age, civil condition, birthplace, occupation, and,
where available, instruction, religion and infirmities, were reviewed as
fully as the want of uniformity in the material permitted (Command
paper, 2860, 1906). The measures taken by the principal states, colonies
and dependencies for the periodical enumeration of their population are
set forth below.

_Canada_.--The first enumeration of what was afterwards called Lower
Canada, took place, as above stated, in 1665, and dealt with the legal,
or domiciled, population, not with that actually present at the time of
the census, a