628 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Mississippi area of decrease would form an unbroken continua- 

 tion of a still larger contiguous territory of decreasing counties, 

 extending from the eastern border of Illinois to Cape Cod, and 

 from Alabama into the Maritime Provinces of the Canadian Do- 

 minion. The portion of this territory lying within the United 

 States extends into fifteen States, covers an area of 174,500 square 

 miles, or over a third more than that of the British Isles, and 

 comprises 289 counties. Of these counties 276 have less rural 

 population than they had in 1880. Of the thirteen increasing 

 counties lying within the lines of this territory and surrounded 

 by the decreasing counties, two are in the Adirondacks ; eight of 

 them comprise the suburbs of Cleveland, Cincinnati, Louisville, 

 Indianapolis, Dayton, and Columbus ; and in the remaining three 

 the increase during the decade has been but thirty-two, or at the 

 rate of less than one sixteenth of one per cent. 



Taking the entire area together, the rural population in 1890 

 and 1880 compares as follows : 



1 880 6,542,070 



1890 6,145,943 



Decrease 396,127 



Percentage of decrease 6 - 05 



This tract, beginning in the province of New Brunswick, ex- 

 tends over all New England, except the northern portion of Maine 

 and New Hampshire and the northeastern county of Vermont; 

 over large portions of Ontario and Quebec ; over all New York 

 north of the counties of Rockland and Westchester ; over north- 

 western New Jersey, and large areas of northeastern and north- 

 western and a small part of southwestern Pennsylvania ; over the 

 greater part of Ohio, except its northwestern and some of its east- 

 ern and southern counties ; over a couple of West Virginia coun- 

 ties lying on the Ohio border ; over all southeastern and much of 

 central Indiana; over a number of the Ohio River counties of 

 Kentucky, and thence over a long and in places comparatively 

 narrow strip of central Kentucky and Tennessee into northern 

 Alabama, in which State it includes four counties ; finally coming 

 to an end some thirty miles south of the Tennessee River. The 

 New England States, with New York and the adjacent counties 

 of Canada, form the compact portion of this tract. From the 

 southern boundary of New York it stretches out in two arms, one 

 to the east and the other to the west of the Alleghanies. The 

 eastern arm is much the shorter of the two, and without a break 

 reaches only to the southern boundary of Carbon County, Penn- 

 sylvania, on the one side, and to the Atlantic coast in Burlington 

 County, New Jersey, on the other. The break here is, however, 

 very short, it being not over five or six miles to the point at which 



