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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



The official statements as to the center of population and as to 

 the distribution of population in other respects, as will be shown, 

 have been very carefully prepared by Mr. Henry Gannett, the 

 able geographer of the tenth and eleventh censuses ; but the state- 

 ments have been made in various bulletins, and are here brought 

 together in connected and compact form, with proper explana- 

 tions. 



It becomes interesting to know how the population of the 

 country is distributed relative to what are recognized as drainage 

 basins, which may be classified as the Atlantic Ocean, the Great 

 Basin, and the Pacific Ocean. The classification of drainage areas 

 under the first great division, that of the Atlantic Ocean, as a pri- 

 mary designation, has for its subsidiary divisions the New Eng- 

 land coast, the Middle Atlantic coast, the South Atlantic coast, 

 the Great Lakes, and the Gulf of Mexico. The Great Basin, for 

 subsidiary divisions, has Great Salt Lake and the Humboldt 

 Kiver. The Pacific Ocean basin consists, secondarily, of the Colo- 

 rado River, the Sacramento River, the Klamath River, and the 

 Columbia River and their several great tributaries. The percent- 

 age of the total population, distributed over these drainage areas 

 or basins, at the last three censuses, has been as follows : 



The table shows that more than ninety-six per cent of the in- 

 habitants live in the country which is drained by the Atlantic 

 Ocean ; that more than one half of the population live in the 

 region drained by the Gulf of Mexico, and that nearly forty-four 

 per cent of the entire population of the country are congregated 



