Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 9.djvu/455

Rh machine came into use deserves to rank as the leading era in history; and that it demands from us more study than either of the preceding ages of the press, iron, bronze, or stone, though they lasted much longer and have heretofore occupied much greater prominence in historical study.

Modern civilization belongs to the Euraryan—the Teutonic, Latin, Celtic, Slavonic and Greek—nationalities which migrated from Asia in the remote past to Europe, whence some of them passed over to other parts of the world, carrying their culture, their energy, and their high capacity for further progress, with them. The Asiatics, the Africans, and the aboriginal Americans and Polynesians, have for the last four centuries acted a part so subordinate in the great drama of human advancement, that they are like the shadows of a picture; they serve mainly as contrasts to bring out the brilliancy of the forms and colors in the light.

The age of steam—the period between 1770 and 1875—has trebled the Euraryans who have given us the enlightenment of the present, and are the hope of the future. Their number a hundred years ago was probably 120,000,000; though Gibbon, in the sixty-second note to the second chapter of his "Decline and Fall," following Voltaire, who was a respectable authority, said that Europe then had 107,000,000 inhabitants, including twenty-two in Germany, twenty in France, twelve in Russia, ten in Italy, eight in Spain and Portugal, eight in Great Britain and Ireland, seven in Scandinavia, as many more in Turkey, and four each in Hungary and the Netherlands. The facilities for getting information then were not so good as now, and, though Gibbon was very careful in his statements, yet he probably made a mistake in his figures. Kolb, in his "Hand-book of Comparative Statistics" (German, and not translated), tells us that France had 22,500,000 in 1770, Spain nine and one-third in 1768, Germany thirty in 1786, and Italy twenty in 1812; and Levi, in his "History of British Commerce," credits Great Britain and Ireland with ten in 1763. After excluding certain nationalities not of Aryan blood in Europe, and adding the British and Spanish colonists in America, we may estimate the total number of Euraryans in 1770 at 120,000,000. The present number is about 360,000,000, including three hundred in Europe, and forty-eight in North America. This great increase, far from being a necessary or natural result of the lapse of time, is entirely unexampled. The Roman Empire had about 120,000,000 inhabitants, and the same territory after a lapse of eighteen centuries had no more. Egypt 3,000 years ago, and Peru and Mexico before the Spanish conquest, had more inhabitants than now. As a general rule, population has been nearly stationary; century after century has passed, with little difference until we come within the magic influence of steam, and then suddenly the Euraryan race, acquiring the power to draw larger crops from the soil, to distribute