seven times the bulk of ours, and is lighter, warmer, and more moist, I have read that it is thinly populated, that only about twelve hundred million human dwellers inhabit it; that its productions are mostly consumed by animals, and that there are millions of square miles that have never been trodden by human feet. Until the other day I read these statements with some doubt, but now I only wonder that the history and literature of the earth are not incorporated with those of Mars.'
'To some extent they are,' said Dr. Somers. 'My old friend Andrew Grayson and I are both acquainted with the main outlines of the history of the earth, and we have read some of the productions of Homer and Shakespeare.'
'Excuse my negligence, Dr. Somers,' said Grayson. 'I ought to have introduced Charles Frankston to you at dinner time, and to have told you that he is an earthborn and yet incorporated there, though not hitherto conscious on this side of his being. That was my reason for mentioning Malthus when I so unceremoniously joined in your conversation.'
'Say nothing about that, my valued friend. Have not we been acquainted for ten years or more?' said the physician. 'I was telling Frankston that his discovery had provided an answer to the population croakers who from age to age threaten us with starvation and advise us to cease marrying, or to marry when life has lost the charm of youth.'
'So it has, though I have not yet mentioned that side of the matter to him. Each human being who is into the world brings a mouth to feed, but also two hands with which to feed it. Given a sphere of labor and each worker will provide more than he consumes. One man working there in the open can grow more provision than one hundred can eat; but that one man, as a troglodyte in his cave, might find life hard if he had to gather shellfish and catch swimming ones for a family of four.'
'The world must have been over populated many times,' said I, 'for it has undergone so many changes. We keep no large animals now, each cow must have eaten the food of ten humans?'
'The cow,' said Dr. Somers, 'was quite a tolerable being; not nearly so wasteful as some; its milk, butter, and cheese were handy though highly concentrated articles of food, and we killed it and ate its flesh. Every portion of it was useful. The hog was more wasteful: it only gave its dead carcase; returning probably one hundredth part of what it had devoured.'
'It was frequently diseased was it not?' I asked.
'Yes! it was a strumous beast and people who consumed much of its flesh, grew coarse. It carried many kinds of parasites into humans; and actually lowered the moral tone, making people more sensual. It was a red-letter day in our calendar when we decided that it should breed no more.'
'The animal whose extinction I most regret,' remarks Grayson, 'was the horse.'
