630 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



tract has increased, and it separates the great northeastern area of 

 decreasing counties from a much smaller, but still an important 

 and well-defined one, comprising twenty-five counties in southern 

 Michigan, six in northern Indiana, and the northwesternmost 

 county of Ohio. This tract, which therefore includes thirty-three 

 counties in all, and covers an area of 18,373 square miles, or about 

 equal to the combined area of Vermont and New Hampshire, is 

 quite regular in its outline. It includes, with the exception of 

 a couple of counties on the Lake Michigan shore, practically all 

 the counties of the southern half of the lower peninsula. The 

 counties in the immediate vicinity of Chicago, and which have 

 gained, perhaps, as a result of the enormous growth of that city, 

 separate this area of decrease central in southern Michigan from 

 that of which the Mississippi River is the center. 



The rural population of this area in Michigan, northern Indi- 

 ana, and northwestern Ohio at the tenth and eleventh censuses 

 compares as follows : 



1880 775,053 



1890 729,423 



Decrease 45,630 



Percentage of decrease • 5 - 89 



There are some clusters or groups of decreasing counties 

 scattered over the cotton States. Thus, in northern Mississippi 

 and southwestern Tennessee there is a group of some eight coun- 

 ties, each of which has lost rural population. This group is very 

 nearly connected through northern Alabama with the great de- 

 creasing group of the Eastern and Central States. There is an- 

 other group on the Mississippi and Big Black Rivers in Missis- 

 sippi and Louisiana, several in central Georgia and Alabama, and 

 a well-defined one in that part of Florida which adjoins south- 

 western Georgia. Compared, however, with the Northern and 

 border States, the decrease in the far Southern States is by no 

 means noteworthy. 



There are in the far West counties which show the usual 

 fluctuations of frontier communities, in which a too rapid boom 

 is not infrequently followed by a period of depression in which 

 emigrants are more numerous than immigrants. The decay of 

 the mining industries of Nevada and the adjacent portions of 

 California and Utah has caused a relatively very heavy decrease 

 in the population of this region, a decrease which has been felt by 

 the cities as well, though usually not to so great an extent as by 

 the more isolated mining camps and the farming settlements de- 

 pendent upon the mines for a market for their products. But 

 with the exception of a few of the older counties of Kansas, in 

 which the same influences have apparently been in operation as 



