The latest census, taken in 1902, is said to yield a total of four hundred and ten millions.

Perhaps three hundred millions would be a juster estimate; even that would absorb no less than one-fifth of the human race.

From this total it is easy to calculate that if the Chinese people were to walk past a given point in single file, the procession would never end; long before the last of the three hundred millions had passed by, a new generation would have sprung up to continue the neverending line.

The census, however, is a very old institution with the Chinese; and we learn that in A.D.

156 the total population of the China of those days was returned as a little over fifty millions.