HEREDITARY DESCENT IN ANCIENT GREECE. 15 



sons. She had forty thousand resident aliens, and a 

 laboring and artisan population of four hundred 

 thousand slaves. 



Little Attica physically resembles Eastern Massa- 

 chusetts. It is a desolate stretch of pine barrens. 

 The agricultural class never could have been numer- 

 ous there. Wherever you irrigate the soil, however, 

 it has almost a tropical fatness ; and undoubtedly 

 the rich banks of the Cephissus, which to-day remind 

 you of the shores of the Nile, were originally much 

 more widely spread into the brown dun of the gen- 

 eral landscape around Athens than they are to-day. 

 Wherever there is no irrigation, a vigorous sunlight 

 comes down, and burns up, not the grasses merely, 

 but the orchards and almost the pines. The stalwart 

 evergreen, which in Norway grows half as high as 

 the magnificent monument yonder on Bunker Hill, 

 is stunted in Attica until in most cases it is a shrub. 

 Only in the gorges, where its roots are watered by 

 springs, does it attain a natural size. This barren 

 little territory had in it, in the century from 530 to 

 430 B.C., ninety thousand free persons, not enough 

 to make a city of respectable size. These were 

 native and free born, or had obtained full rights, if 

 emigrants. Scholars are very well agreed as to these 

 statistics. Elaborate investigation has been applied 

 to the topic, and we do not need at present to go 

 carefully into the proof that this was the population 

 of ancient Attica. 



9. The population of any country renews itself 

 about three times a century. 



