Again and again this old poetic fancy of the earth as one great
cemetery buried several times deep with dead men, women and
children, has been refuted by figures. But great is the error
and will prevail, unless the truth be well and steadily upheld.
The population of the earth is now about 1,500,000,000. Suppose
the human race to have existed for 6,000 years and you have
sixty centuries. In each century you may count three generations
of mankind, or one hundred and eighty generations in all, each
being a generation of 1,500,000,000. Now, lay out a cemetery
for one generation. It will be a huge estimate to give to every
man, woman, and child a grave five feet by two, or ten square.
You want for your graveyard, then, 15,000,000,000 square feet of
ground. A square mile contains something less than 28,000,000
square feet. You want, then, a graveyard fifty-five miles long
by ten wide for your whole generation. Now multiply this by one
hundred and eighty and you have your burial-ground for 6,000
years of mankind. That is, a strip of land, 1,800 miles long
by 55 miles wide will be ample. In other words, a cemetery
containing 100,000 square miles would be sufficient for the
entire human race to lie side by side. The estimate which I
have given you of continuous population is obviously enormously
large. The estimate of the size of each grave is very large. A
strictly correct estimate would reduce the size of the required
cemetery more than one-half. But enormous as it is, you could
lay out your burial-ground for all men who have lived on earth,
so that they could lie side by side in Arizona or in California,
or you could lay it out in Texas large enough to accommodate
the race of 6,000 years past, and also the race for 6,000 years
yet to come, all sleeping in the soil of that one State of this
Union. But some one says the race of man has been on the earth
100,000 years. That is a pure imagination and there is not, so
far as I know, a fact on which to rest it. But suppose it is
true, and suppose the population always what it is now, you
have provided for 6,000 years of it. You want nearly seventeen
times as large a cemetery for the generations of a thousand
centuries. That is, you want 1,700,000 square miles in it. Lay
it out whenever you please, 1,700 miles long by 1,000 miles
wide. It is but part of the United States. And so enormously
large have been the rough estimates thus far used, it is safe
to say that if the human race has been in existence 100,000
years, a separate grave could be provided for every individual
of the race within a part of the United States east of the
Mississippi River.--W. C. PRIME, New York _Journal of
Commerce_.
(327)
=Censure, Misplaced=--See REFLECTION, IMPERFECT.
=Census-taking, Primitive=--See COLLECTIVE LABOR.