Doctor, you must lose sight of us for a little while." "I know it," he replied, "but my heavenly Father will not for a moment lose sight of me."

Although arrested suddenly in the fullness of power, usefulness, and hope, he felt no shock of alarm or dismay, but accepted with resignation the will of God. Yet he relinquished only with obstinate reluctance the hope that he might recover sufficiently to do a little more work. He said, “If I might get up from this sick-bed, I could preach better than I ever did. I may never again go down the long furrow with the reapers, but I would like to throw in my sickle with the gleaners." His sheaves were all in. Nothing remained for him on earth but suffering, mitigated by the ministry of loving hands, the practical sympathy of a cordon of friends doing all in their power to relieve him from earthly anxieties, and the great grace of God. Tormented with pain, he spoke of the Divine goodness with grateful tears, and rebuked every murmur uttered in his presence. Often when distress was severest he quoted,

"Courage, my soul, thy bitter cross,
In every trial here,

Shall bear thee to thy heaven above,
But shall not enter there."

His first words almost every morning during his illness were, "Bless the Lord, O my soul!" Looking toward eternity, he said, "The hill-tops beyond are gilded with glory. The shadows are all here." He hated death with the strong instinct of a vital man, but loved the Lord of life. The Church watched his dying for four weary months, and when, in his fifty-fifth year, in the dusk of evening on the 8th of March, 1880, quietly as a tired child falls asleep, he crossed the shaded frontier into the better life, Methodism from ocean to ocean, and from the St. Lawrence to the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, was smitten with a sense of loss. At his funeral, held in St. Paul's Church, Newark, in a driving snow-storm, and attended by a great multitude, addresses were delivered by Bishop Simpson and Secretary Reid, the sole survivor in the missionary office. Of him Dr. Reid has said: "All parts of his nature conspired to make him a brilliant character. The ends of the earth weep for him, for the monuments of his toil are in all lands.”

ART. II.-REMARKABLE PROBLEMS OF OUR

POPULATION.

Bulletin de la Sociétié de Géographie. Paris. 1881, 1882.

THE subject we are about to discuss touches our national egotism; and have we not, long ago, had enough of that? Unquestionably the proverbial boastfulness of Americans has had some considerable justification; they had great "fathers," and have been accustomed to see natural grandeurs all around them-great lakes and rivers; great mountains, rich in mines; and great prairies, cornfields for the bread of the world. The great destiny of the country became a sort of intuition in their national consciousness. They are not, also, to be contemned, if not admired, for the pluckiness of their self-assertion at a time when Europe treated them only with supercilious sarcasm, and her Trollopes, Fidlers, and Dickenses caricatured them before the Old World. All this, however, has now changed; Europe is now dependent largely on their bread and cheese, their beef and pork; their inventions and manufactures are seen by the American traveler in the shops of all her great cities; he travels her lakes and rivers in the steam-boat, finds the telephone in her principal towns, and telegraph-wires along her highways, and hears the murmur of the "sewingmachine" through the cottage windows of the obscure villages of the Hartz and Alps. American men of science are now recognized as authorities by the best scientific authorities of Europe. The works of American poets and novelists are welcomed by her best families; and American historians are standards on the shelves of her libraries; some of them-like Irving, Ticknor, Prescott, and Motley-are esteemed as her best authorities on questions of her own history. If Europe still holds Canada and Australia somewhat aloof, as secondary or provincial sections of the civilized world, she no longer thus disparages the United States. She now admits us as equals to the full comity of her greatest states. She has gone further, and has begun to treat us with rather flattering complacency. We may, then, well enough abate our old boastfulness, and trust our reputation to her good sense. But on a subject like that we are about to present it is impossible to write without

apparent egotism. Fortunately for us, however, we are to be backed by European authority, and are to reproduce chiefly European opinions. After this apologetic introduction (which we acknowledge to be somewhat equivocal) we crave permission to go through our discussion without wasting our limited space— entirely too brief for the subject-in modest qualifications.

The "Bulletin" of the Geographical Society of Paris has lately given some interesting papers on the population of the United States, from the pen of M. L. Simonin, who is, apparently, a French savant sojourning among us, and who has made the statistics of our last census a special study. M. Simonin commends strongly the work of our "Bureau of Statistics" at Washington, approving particularly the long time (so impatiently resented by ourselves) which it spends in elaborating its important problems-problems the most surprising, as he thinks, and the most suggestive of economic and social lessons, ever presented in the official documents of nations. Our last census he pronounces "the most remarkable in its geographical, economic, and moral phenomena that has ever been made." His discussions of its principal results have excited much curiosity and no little wonder among French statisticians; and some quite novel questions and problems have been addressed to him, in reply, by his confrères of the Paris Sociétié de Geographie. It seems that Europe is begining to perceive that the New World is about to exercise a really revolutionary influence on the commercial, political, and social destinies of the Old, if not, indeed, of the entire world.

The facts which indicate this coming revolution are incontestable, but, at first view, they seem incredible to European thinkers. They are marvels in the social evolution of our times, and French thinkers, especially, are indisposed to accredit marvels. M. Simonin, however, confronts them with the indisputable numerical proofs; they speak for themselves, and admit, as he thinks, of no evasion.

Some of his deductions may well startle Americans themselves, sanguine and boastful though we usually be. We propose to review a few of them, including some which his formula implies, but which he has not discussed.

Among the most remarkable considerations which his papers suggest are the "Center of Population," the rate of its move

ment westward, the time of the completion of this movement, the amount of our population at that period, and its comparative strength considered in respect to the population of Europe and to that of the whole earth.

The elements of such calculations must, of course, be various and difficult; there is much room for conjecture, and no little temptation to it, but there is a better than Dædalian escape from the Cretan labyrinth of the facts concerned; the clew through them is mathematical, and M. Simonin holds, with a steady hand, to that clew. For example, the ratio of the growth of our population has been so regular as almost to confirm Mr. Buckle's theory that even statistics are subject to exact law. We have been able to predict, with no little confidence, the aggregate result of the census of each decade for nearly a hundred years, for nearly the whole of our national history, notwithstanding all the contingencies which affect that result-political changes, wars with England, with Mexico, with ourselves; commercial revulsions, or "crises," nearly every fifteen or twenty years; variations in immigration, itself so affected by European political, military, and commercial contingencies. Nearly half a century ago Professor Tucker, of Harvard University, published calculations by which he estimated, in round numbers, our population for each decade down to the present time; his estimates for even the latest periods were singularly correct; he gave, for 1870, thirty-eight millions; it was thirty-eight and a half, notwithstanding the Mexican and Civil wars, the unexpected movements of European emigration, and, especially, the discovery of gold in California, which so much confounded those movements. For 1880 he gave fifty millions-the aggregate at which we usually state the last census. All his errors were short of the actual amounts officially reported; his formula was so correct that apparent errors in one decade were compensated in another, as the "perturbations" of the planets compensate one another and maintain the mathematical harmony of astronomical law.

We are all familiar with the phrase "Center of Population,' but have a vague idea of its significance. M. Simonin admires the formula by which our statisticians have used the "Grandes Statistiques" of the Republic, during ninety years, for the ascertainment of this "great movement" of our population,

and the solution of the remarkable problems which it involves.

He says:

They suppose that the land of the United States is reduced to a plane surface, and that it has no weight, but that the men who are borne along on this surface have weight. They calculate the mean weight of these men at 70 kilogrammes. Now at New York, for example, there are to-day, in round numbers, say one million of inhabitants; it has thus a weight of 70 millions of kilogrammes. Philadelphia has, say 800,000 inhabitants, and therefore 56 millions of kilogrammes, and so on. Now all who have calculated centers of gravity in mechanics, all who have studied elementary statics, know perfectly that, with the definition here given, it is very easy to calculate what is called the center of gravity of population, or more simply the center of population, or more simply the center of population, at any given time. As the population began in the East, and was first dispersed along the Atlantic coast, it is evident that its center of gravity must be nearer the Atlantic than the Pacific; for where the inhabitants are fewest the arm of the lever must obviously be longest, and thus we arrive at the determination of a mathematical point which bears all the country in equilibrium, as on a pivot. It is this point that we name the center of population.

He traces it through ninety years. In 1790 it was 23 miles east of Baltimore; that is to say, on the Atlantic coast. In 1800 it was 18 miles west of Baltimore; it had advanced no less than 41 miles in a decade. In 1810 it was 40 miles north-west of Washington; it was still in Maryland, but on its frontier. In 1820 it was 16 miles to the north of Woodstock, and left Maryland for Virginia. In 1830 it was 19 miles south-west of Moorfield, in western. Virginia; in 1840 it was still in Virginia, 16 miles south of Clarksburg; in 1850 it was 23 miles south-east of Rochersburg. It then left Virginia and entered Ohio; in 1860 it was 20 miles south of Chillicothe; in 1870 it was 48 miles north-east of Cincinnati, and at last we find it, in 1880, about 8 miles south-west of Cincinnati, still in Ohio, but near Kentucky, which it will enter by the next census. M. Simonin gives a map showing this line-the line of the march of civilization, in the wilderness of the New World, from the Atlantic to the Mississippi. With very little deviation it keeps along the thirty-ninth parallel; it goes straight westward; the phrase, "Westward the star of empire takes its way,' is not merely poetic," he remarks, "it is mathematical."