Page:Life of Sir William Petty 1623 – 1687.djvu/241

 rent of land. 'As great need of money,' he says, 'heightened exchange, so doth great need of corn raise the price of that likewise, and consequently of the rent of land that bears corn and lastly of the land itself.... Hence it comes to pass that land intrinsically alike near populous places, such as where the perimeter of the area that feeds them is great, will not only yield more rent for these reasons, but also more years purchase than in remote places, by reason of the pleasure and honour extraordinary of having lands there.'

The 'Political Arithmetick,' from which some quotations have already been made, consists of three parts. The first two consist of a number of short essays on the 'Vital and other Statistics of London, Dublin, Paris, Rome, Rouen, and other great Cities, and of the United Provinces of Holland,' and were published in 1682 and 1687. The scope of the first essay was to be 'concerning the value and increase of people and colonies'—such is the exordium—and was intended to precede another essay concerning the growth of the city of London. Only a sort of syllabus of it remains, the fourteen heads of which well illustrate the many-sided character of the mind of the writer, which at one moment is seen grappling with the hardest statistics, and then flying off into speculative inquiries of an abstruse character in the domain of theology. He proposes to examine 'how many live on their lands; how many on personal estate; how many on professions; how many pay poll tax, and how much; how to plant colonies; the relative value of land in colonies and at home; with calculations in how many years England will be fully peopled.' These, and kindred topics, form the first ten heads of inquiry; from which the reader is suddenly transported by an abrupt transition into an appendix 'concerning the number of wild fowl and of sea fish at the end of every thousand years since Noah's flood,' and an inquiry as to what may be 'the meaning of glorified bodies, in case the place of the blessed shall be without the convex of the orb of the fixed stars;' just as the essay on population concludes with a grotesque statistical argument to prove that