GEOGRAPHY OF CENTRAL FLORIDA 255

 CHURCHES

 Statistics of churches have been gathered by every United States census from 1850 to 1890, and later by special inquiry between the regular census periods, in 1906 and 1916. The information is obtalied not by asking each person what church he belongs to, if any, (which is done in some European countries, but would be repugnant to American ideas), but by correspondence with church officials. It is therefore hardly as accurate as most census data, but it will suffice to show the prospective settler what to expect here in that particular.
 A source of considerable uncertainty is that different churches have different criteria of membership, some counting all baptized persons, including infants, and some only those who have joined the church voluntarily. (If the statistics were restricted to adults we would have a fairer basis of comparison.) Another minor difficulty is that one comparatively new denomination (which has quite a large following among persons of leisure, mostly in northern cities) refused to give any information about its membership for the enumeration of 1916, according to the census volume. For these reasons it is hardly worth while to estimate the ratio of church members to total population, but in most parts of the United States it amounts to less than half.
 The data for 1916 (published early in 1920) only are used here. It would have been more or less interesting to give some 1906 figures for comparison, but the differences probably would not be pronounced enough to warrant the extra labor, and in 1906 the white and colored Baptists were not separated in the county tables. The leading denominations in each region have already been indicated in the regional descriptions, but without giving percentages, on account of the uncertainties mentioned above and below. For this reason-the regions are not contrasted in the following table, which gives statistics for the whole State, central Florida with and without Hillsborough County, and the city of Tampa by itself, the last to illustrate conditions in a city with a large foreign-born. population.