154 POPULATION. 



Kindred. 



If we suppose each couple of our ancestors to have 

 left, one with another, two children, and each of these 

 children, on an average, to have left two more, (and 

 without such a supposition the human species must 

 be daily diminishing,) we shall find that all of us have 

 now subsisting near two hundred and seventy mil- 

 lions (270,000,000) of kindred in the fifteenth degree. 



Power of Increase. 



The power of increase in plants and animals is 

 prodigious. In the Philosophical Transactions for 

 1768, an account is given of an experiment, in which, 

 by separating the roots obtained from a single grain 

 of wheat, and transplanting them in a favourable soil, 

 a return was obtained of above 500,000 grains. The 

 whole world might be covered with sheep in less 

 than a century. 



It is to the ignorance and bad government of our 

 ancestors that we are indebted for the comparative 

 facility which we now enjoy of procuring subsist- 

 ence ;* had it been otherwise, the population that 

 would have accumulated since the reign of William 

 the Conqueror, must have overflowed like the 

 swarming of the northern hives during the fall of 

 the Roman empire. 



Population of the United States. 

 The censuses of 1800, 1810, and 1820, furnish 



* An entertaining writer says, " If all the Turks and Egyp- 

 tians that are to die next year of the plague, were to be devoured 

 during the present by crocodiles, a certain quantity of food would 

 be gained, and things go on just as before. The Roman empire, 

 and the world generally, would have been equally populous and 

 prosperous, if the Huns and Ostrogoths had eaten each other,, 

 instead of strewing their own bones and those of their antago- 

 nists through the wilds of Dacia, and along the banks of the 

 Danube. 



