Page:Vol 3 History of Mexico by H H Bancroft.djvu/755

Rh cover this deficiency, while expressing a belief that the addition of a sixth or seventh would not be wrong. Navarro, followed by several others, adds a fifth. The former author took special pains to obtain statistics, in order to arrive at an estimate for 1803. This was no easy task in a country subject to such extremes of climate from the hot malarious coast to the temperate plateau and the cold mountain region occupied by so many different races with varying modes of life. He came to the conclusion, however, that the birth-rate could be placed at one in seventeen, and the death-rate at one in thirty, and that the population would double in about thirty-eight years. The average proportion of births to deaths appearing as 183 to 100 he accepted this, within a small fraction, as a rate for calculating the increase during the decade following the census of 1793, and thus arrived at a total population for 1803 of 5,837,100.

Since this time a number of calculations have been made which take the census of 1793 for a base, but reduce the increase to about one and a half per cent yearly for the two following decades. During the revolutionary period this rate must be lowered still more, and even afterward the unsettled condition of affairs operated against large recuperation. The most valuable estimates appear to be those made for 1810 by the auditor-general of ways and means for New Spain, Fernando Navarro y Noriega, whose sources could not have been well surpassed by any contemporary. Even his calculations, however, had for several provinces to rest on comparative estimates, but for others he was able to present more reliable