Page:The Last Judgement and Second Coming of the Lord Illustrated.djvu/224

 conceivably great; .—A professor of the University of Berlin has recently published the result of his researches as to the population of the earth, according to which Europe contains 272 millions; Asia, 720 millions; Africa, 89 millions; America, 200 millions; and Polynesia, 2 millions—making a grand total of 1,283 millions of inhabitants. As in places where deaths are accurately registered the annual mortality is, at least, one in forty, the number of deaths must be about 32 millions every year, which gives 87,761 per day, 3653 per hour, and 61 per minute, so that every second witnesses the extinction of one human life. Another calculator states that the number of persons who had lived on the earth since the creation, is 36,627,843,275,075,855.

3,097,600 square yards in a mile.

200,000,000 square miles on the surface of the earth.

619,520,000,000,000

36,627,834,275,075,85 5, persons who have lived. 36,008,314,275,075,855 more persons than there is space for.

"For the benefit of those who discuss the subject of population, war, pestilence, famine, etc., it may be well to mention that the number of human beings at the end of the hundredth generation, commencing from a single pair, doubling in each generation (say in thirty years) and allowing for each man, woman, and child an average space of four feet in height, and one foot square, would form a vertical column having for its base the whole surface of the earth and sea spread out into a plain, and for its height 3674 times the sun's distance from the earth. The number of human beings thus piled one on the other would amount to 460,790,000,000,000."—Sir John Herschel, in the Fortnightly Review, 1865. These figures may appear somewhat discrepant from the argument, adopted in chapter vii., in which it is contended that inhabitants from this earth only, could never become numerically adequate to supply the purposes of infinite love; but it is not really so, for what is the greatest array of figures to that which is infinite? but, supposing each person to be allowed a single square yard of space on which to stand, there would not be room enough on the surface of the whole earth for