Of the 82 municipalities, 8 only had an excess of females, while of the 74 in which males predominated, there were 12 in which that sex had 55 per cent or more. Classifying the municipalities in accordance with their percentage of foreign whites, it appears that 18 contained less than 5 per cent; 45, or more than half, had between 5 and 10 per cent; 17 had at least 10 but less than 20 per cent; while 2 municipalities only, both of them in Habana province, had over 20 per cent.

As to proportion of colored, there was but 1 municipality which contained only 10 per cent; 49 contained more than 10 and less than 30 per cent and 23 had between 30 and 50 per cent; while in 9 more than half the population were colored.

AGE, SEX, COLOR, AND NATIVITY.

Probably the best summary of the age of a people or of an element of the population is the mean age-which is the figure that would be obtained if the ages of all the people were added together and the sum total divided by the number of people. Since it was impracticable to obtain the mean in this way, a shorter method has been followed. The number of inhabitants is given in the case of those under one year of age and of those in each year from 1 to 5. At greater ages the number is given in age groups of 5 years each, from 5 to 9, 10 to 14, etc. The number of persons of each year of age up to and including 4 years was multiplied by the actual number of years of age. The average age for those from 5 to 9 years of age is 7 years; consequently the number of children reported for those years was multiplied by 7. Similarly, the number in the next age group, from 10 to 14 years, was multiplied by 12, and so on. These products were added together and the sum was divided by the total population of Cuba.

According to this method, the average age of the people of Cuba was 23.4 years. This is exactly one year less than the average in 1899; the difference is due, as will be shown further on, to the enormous increase in the number of young children. The average age in 1907 was slightly less than that of the people of the Philippine Islands in 1903 (23.9 years), and decidedly less than that of the people of the United States in 1900 (26.3 years).

The following table shows for 1907 and 1899 the average ages of the inhabitants of Cuba, classified by sex and by color and nativity:

The change in the average age of foreign born whites is probably significant only of a change in the average age of the immigrants. The average age of the colored people of the United States in 1900 was 23.2 years.

The average ages of the people of each province and of Habana city were as follows in 1907:

The reasons for these differences will be clearly developed in the discussion which follows.

The following table presents the percentages which the number of persons of different age groups bore to the total population in 1907, with similar figures for Cuba for 1899, Porto Rico for the same year, and the United States and Spain for 1900:

The following table presents percentages showing the proportion of inhabitants in each age group in the case of the native whites, foreign whites, and colored in Cuba in 1907 and the colored in the United States in 1900: