46 
NOTES ON THE POPULATION OF JAVA. 
The size of the villages was very various, ranging from 20 
inhabitants up to 390. The mean was about 180. The pro¬ 
portion of marriages to tlie population appears from the 
statement to be about 1 in 79, but I believe them, in reality, 
to be much more numerous, for those given include only the 
marriages of youths and virgins, no notice being taken of 
second, third and even fourth marriages, which are not unfre¬ 
quent with the Javanese, among whom the marriage knot is 
easily and often capriciouly untied. 
The following tabular statement gives the proportion of 
marriages, births and deaths of the population, and the pro¬ 
portion per cent by which the births exceed the deaths, 
omitting fractions: 
No. 
Proportion of 
Marriages in 
population. 
Proportion of 
Births in 
population. 
Proportion of 
Deaths in 
population. 
Excess of Births 
per cent 
above Deaths 
1 
65 
24 
47 
95 
2 
98 
19 
62 
230 
3 
108 
18 
94 
417 
4 
79 
30 
101 
227 
5 
145 
30 
99 
227 
6 
81 
27 
113 
315 
7 
87 
24 
39 
60 
8 
70 
29 
56 
89 
9 
105 
26 
44 
67 
10 
59 
29 
47 
57 
The proportion of deaths to the population appears to have 
been 1 in 68 and of the births 1 in 24, while the proportion of 
the excess of births above deaths to the whole of the living, 
is as 1 to 40. The period in which the population would 
double itself, therefore, would be 28 years. Imperfect, and 
limited as the data are on which this calculation is founded, 
it is, probably, not an exaggeration, judging by a comparison 
of the census of the population of the whole island made in 
1815 with that made in 1845. The first of these gave a po¬ 
pulation of 4,175,974, and the last of 9,542.045 which shows 
that the number had more than doubled itself in 30 years.* 
But the births and deaths bear very different proportions 
to each other and to the whole population in the different 
localities in which my enquiry was conducted, and I shall give 
few of the results. 
(1.) In 11 villages two miles from Yugyakarta with a 
population of 2,021, the births were 1 to 24 and the death s 
* See Contributions to the Statistics of the Population of Java, by B 
Bleeker, Journ, Ind. Arch, vol. I p. 75. 
