Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/315

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to 25,000 and to all other non-European countries to one or two thousand. The birth rate in the city of Berlin has fallen from 40 per thousand to 20 per thousand. Germany has no larger population than it can provide for and needs at home. It has none to spare for emigration, still less for the field of battle.

The birth rate and the natural increase of population are the fundamental factors in racial advance. The Slavs have overrun northwestern Europe and will continue to spread to the south and west. Their natural increase of population far exceeds that of Germany, and will do so increasingly as the death rate declines in Russia and the birth rate continues to decline in Germany. There are now three Russian children born for each German child. How can Germany's army of four million soldiers contend against a surplus of five million children born each year in Russia? If Germany had waited a little longer for its war, England would have been on its side. But nothing except a decline in the Russian birth rate can check its ultimate triumph. We can only hope that it will be a victory of peace and civilization.

record with regret the death of Dr. Francis Humphreys Storrer, long professor of agricultural chemistry at Harvard University; of the Rev. Horace Carter Hovey, known for his publications on caverns; of Dr. Frederic Lawrence Kortright, professor of chemistry