rRODUCTIVENESS OF THE EARTH. 43 



Are these idle speculations, based upon uncertain or extrava- 

 gant data ? If any think so, let them remember the rapid 

 growth of our own country. In less than ninety years, we have 

 increased from 3,000,000 to more than 30,000,000. This is 

 more than equivalent to doubling once in every thirty years. 

 If we make an ample allowance for immigration from foreign 

 countries, the natural increase of our people, if it continue 

 according to the past ratio, would double our population at 

 least as often as every fifty years. This rate of increase, 

 extended all over the world, would bring the population of the 

 globe up to the enormous aggregate of 30,000,000,000 in less 

 than 150 years. But it will probably be long before most coun- 

 tries of the earth attain to that measure of liberty, good 

 government, and prosperity, which has given us such an unpre- 

 cedented increase. 



Still, these estimates show what the present system of things 

 is capable of, according to the laws which have regulated the 

 increase of population in times past ; and they give rise to 

 grave thoughts in regard to the future destiny of this world. 

 According to what seems to be but a sober and moderate 

 estimate, in less than one thousand years at the farthest, in 

 about one-sixth of the time that mankind have already existed 

 in the world, the number of human beings on the globe will 

 fully equal the capacity of the earth to sustain them, according 

 to any rate of productiveness in the soil which experience 

 authorizes us to expect. 



What then shall we conclude ? Shall fish be substituted for 

 flesh and grain, and will man learn to be an amphibious culti- 

 vator of the watery acres, and all the year become one long 

 Lent? Shall we have recourse to the supposition of a miracu- 

 lous millenial fruitfulness of the ground, and endorse the 

 prediction of Father Papias, the sanguine Chiliast bishop of the 

 second century ? " The days will come," he says, " in which 

 there shall grow vineyards, having each ten thousand stocks ; 

 and each stock ten thousand branches ; each branch ten 

 thousand shoots ; each shoot ten thousand clusters ; each 

 cluster ten thousand grapes ; and each grape, squeezed, shall 

 yield ten thousand measures of wine, (of nine gallons each ;) 

 and when any of the saints shall go to pluck a bunch, 

 another bunch shall cry out, ' I am a better bunch, take me, 



