The Harvard School of Public Health has recently acquired one of the most intricate filing machines ever made to assist in its work of compiling-vital statistics.

It is a complicated affair about eight feet long and four high that will perform some twelve operations at once, counting land filing the cards that are fed to it according to a series of punches.

When the record of a certain hospital patient comes to the School, all the information about him, such as age, number of teeth, etc., numbering perhaps 500, facts, is put onto these cards by means of a code, a punch, for example, in row five column 37 meaning that the person in question is a convalescent.

Then, when a doctor wants to find out information which might help to locate the cause of a disease, he takes a certain number of the cards and runs them through the machine, arranging the apparatus to separate out the facts that-he desires.

There are about 300,000 cards on file at the School of Public Health, affording an invaluable mass of data on the external causes of disease. Without the machine it would be almost impossible to use these records.