Ch. viii. , in England, 419 



years, taken in this manner, can by no means be 

 considered as sufficient to establish a just average; 

 and what rather encourages the suspicion, that 

 these particular years might be more than usually 

 favourable with regard to births is, that the in- 

 crease of births from 1780 to 1785 is unusually 

 small,* which would naturally be the case with- 

 out supposing a slower progress than before, if 

 the births in 1780 had been accidentally above 

 the average. 



On the whole, therefore, considering the pro- 

 bable inaccuracy of the earlier registers, and the 

 very great danger of fallacy in drawing general 

 inferences from a few detached years, I do not 

 think that we can depend upon any estimates of 

 past population, founded on a calculation from 

 the births, till after the year 1780, when every 

 following year is given, and a just average of the 

 births may be obtained. As a further confirma- 

 tion of this remark I will just observe, that in the 

 final summary of the abstracts from the registers 

 of England and Wales it appears, that in the year 

 1790, the total number of births was 248,774, in 

 the year 1795, 247,218, and in 1800, 247,147/f 

 Consequently if we had been estimating the popu- 

 lation from the births, taken at three separate 

 periods of five years, it would have appeared, 

 that the population during the last ten years had 

 been regularly decreasing, though we have very 



* Obscrv. on the Results of the Population Act, p. 9. 

 f Population Abstracts, Parish Registers, p. 455. 

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