Page:Supplement to the fourth, fifth, and sixth editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica - with preliminary dissertations on the history of the sciences - illustrated by engravings (IA gri 33125011196181).pdf/33

Rh sumption of wealth; the theory of, and trade in money; the means employed for raising supplies for public expenditure; the effects of subjecting the food of the people to artificial regulation; the causes which regulate the increase and decrease of their numbers; the causes and effects of pauperism and mendicity; and the expedients that have been adopted or proposed for the relief, removal, or mitigation of those evils.

In the branch of Political Arithmetic, there are two articles, by the able Calculator already mentioned as the author of the article on Annuities. The first, on Bills of Mortality, explains the history, formation, and uses of these important registers; the other, on the Law of Mortality, explains the principle which governs the waste of human life, and furnishes the means of calculating the probable length of its duration at any given age.

After the primary division of the Sciences and Arts, the three connected provinces of, occupy the largest portion of the present work. The observations and inquiries made during the last twenty years have produced a great accession of new information in all of them. During that period, the obscure districts of central Africa, the interior regions and vast rivers of the American continent, the numerous islands which compose the two new divisions of the world in the Indian and Pacific Oceans, and the icy seas which involve the Poles, have been visited by various expeditions of discovery, which have contributed essentially to rectify and extend our geographical knowledge. During that period too, great changes have taken place in the political geography and condition of states. Many transfers of territory and dominion have been witnessed in the old world, and a number of independent communities have arisen in the most depressed quarters of the new;—in quarters, where liberty, it is to be hoped, will ere long be established upon a solid basis, and fresh scenes of exertion opened to the expansive and illimitable powers of British industry and enterprise. The means of information respecting the internal and relative circumstances of nations, have also been much enlarged during that period. It has produced two authoritative enumerations of the population of our own country; and a variety of publications, domestic and foreign, replete with instructive details in all the branches of statistical inquiry. These various considerations seemed to require, d