POPULATION. 141 



The devastations occasioned in the capital, by the terrible 

 earthquake which happened in the night of the twenty-eighth 

 of 06tober of the above year, and the epidemical diseases by 

 which that calamitous event was immediately followed, oc- 

 casioned a decrease of the population, of from six to eight 

 thousand souls. The enumeration having been accordingly 

 repeated, by the same mode of framing the estimate, that 

 is, by the books of the confessors, in the year 1757, about 

 fifty-four thousand inhabitants were found. As there is, how- 

 ever, reason to suppose that the population of the plains sur- 

 rounding the capital was included on this occasion also, it 

 does not appear that the result can be employed in a dire6l 

 way, in making a positive comparison between that state and 

 the presents 



This observation applies to another gross computation made 

 in 1 78 1, and in the years immediately following, by which 

 the population of this capital was regulated at sixty thousand 

 eight hundred souls, and the authors of which expressed their 

 persuasion that it might be extended to seventy thousand. It 

 would seem, however, that an error crept into the elementary 

 data of this account ; since, by consulting the testimony of the 



an excess of twenty-two thousand seven hundred and forty-one individuals, in the 

 lapse of forty-six years, during which there was not any new cause to be assigned 

 for an increase of population, there is every reason to suppose that the fa£l was ex- 

 aggerated by Bravo De Castilla, from whose document this statement is drawn, 

 •with the truly politic idea, that on its coming to the knowledge of foreign nations, 

 they would be deterred from fitting out expeditions for the 5outh Seas, which might 

 be attended by losses and disasters to the Spanish colonies, similar to those that ac- 

 companied the expeditions undertaken during the preceding century, and at the com- 

 mencement of the eighteenth. 



sight, 



