SOME INTERESTING CALCULATIONS.
A LECTURER in Music Hall, Boston, on a recent Sunday evening—Rev. W. H. H. Murray—is reported as dealing in glittering generalities of figures to disprove the theory of a final judgment of all men, and it would appear that his audience accepted his arithmetic as solid truth. We have nothing to do with his theology of the judgment, but there ought to be a judgment and condemnation in Boston of any one who delivers such trash to an audience having an ordinary common school education. He is reported to have spoken thus:— "Now the population of the earth is 1,000,000,000, and a generation dies every thirty years. In every thirty years, then, 1,000,000,000 of human beings go out of the world and 1,000,000,000 come in. Forty years ago the church taught that the world was 6,000 years old. She don't to-day pretend to guess within 100,000 years how old the world is. Very well. What has been the population of the world since the race began? By what arithmetic shall you compute the swarming millions? Take the globe and flatten it into a vast plain, 24,000 miles by 24, and it would accommodate but a fraction of the human beings that have lived upon its surface. Where is the locality of the judgment to be, then? Can it have a locality?" Now make the wildest conceivable estimates: suppose that the human race has existed on this earth 100,000 years, and that the population has never from the first day been smaller than this estimate for the present time, namely, 1,000,000,000. For the sake of easy calculation, instead of the estimate of thirty years to a generation, call it three generations to a century. There will then appear to have been three thousand generations of a thousand millions each, who, being assembled, require standing room. For a crowded meeting of men, women, and children, it would be ample estimate to give each two square feet of room. A square mile contains, in round numbers, 25,000,000 square feet, and 12,500,000 persons would stand on it. Therefore eighty square miles would hold a generation, and three thousand times that space would hold the population of a hundred thousand years. That is to say, 240,000 square miles would contain them, and, gathered in a parallelogram, they would stand in a space six hundred miles long by four hundred broad. They could be easily accommodated in one or two of our States. Dead, and buried side by side, they would require only five times their standing space, or (say) 1,200,000 square miles, and the United States of America has ample wild lands as yet untwanted and unoccupied to give them a cemetery. But it is just as well before leaving the subject to say that the hundred thousand years of the reverend lecturer's imagination is as wild talk as his figures. Men of uncertain faith are very fond of saying that other men have no faith. Nothing can be more absurd than what he says about the church. The confused man who fell off a stage coach into the mud thought the coach had upset. Mr. Murray will soon find out that the church, whatever its denominational name, is a great deal more steady in its ancient faith than are he and others who would gladly convince outsiders that the old coach has actually gone over. In his lecture as reported he makes a sad jumble of two distinct subjects—the age of the world and the age of the human race on its surface. The men who hold notions about the extreme antiquity of the human race have been very few, and have produced no sensible effect on the faith of the church or the general opinion of the world, and among what are called scientists, the present difference of opinion as to the age of the human race is limited to a comparatively short period. Bunsen's theory of a date B. C. 20,000 for Egyptian origins has vanished, and Mariette Bey's date of B. C. 5,000 for Menes (or Misraim) will satisfy the views of the most extreme among recognized men of sense. The bone cave men have been met with the simple rules of evidence, which apply to their supposed discoveries as they apply to all questions of fact; and it is found that they have not proved in a single instance that human bones have been lying fifty, forty, or ten centuries in those caves. The theory that the Mississippi had been for forty thousand years depositing drift over human bones found in the deposit, disappeared in mist when Humphreys and Abbott, United States engineer officers on duty, having no theory to sustain, accurately observed and satisfactorily determined that the entire delta of the Mississippi has required only four thousand years for total deposit. It is no longer a question of religion against science, but a case in which common sense and a knowledge of the laws of evidence are demanding something more than assertion without proof, asking for facts in distinction from theory. On the whole it has become the fashion to laugh a little at the fantastic theories of science falsely so-called. Meantime none of these theories have produced any sensible effect on the church or its teachings. There are just as many good people and just as many intellectual people as ever, who still believe and teach that the human race is about six thousand years old, and that a deluge has once reduced its population to next to nothing. Faith in the old record of Moses is so prevalent, and there are so many millions of educated and reasonable people holding it, that it is really worth the while of boys and girls, and perhaps some adults, to apply arithmetic to the facts as accepted by these good people of old and modern times. Thus in six thousand years there are one hundred and eighty generations, and as we know something by historic evidence of the sparse populations of former times in some parts of the world, and must make allowance for the deluge (which all nations believe to have occurred), we shall be more than safe in estimating one-half the present population as the average in all past generations. Then 180 generations, each of 500,000,000, gives us 90,000,000,000 for the whole human race. Graves of ten square feet for each would be easily found in each of quite a number of the States of the Union, and this assembly of all the generations of mankind would stand in a circle around Mont Blanc, Mount Washington, or Mount Sinai, so near that every eye could see the summit not fifty miles distant.