When the history of the great famine and epidemic sicknesses of 1817-18 was written, it was found that this calamity had fallen upon a population that had grown imperceptibly until it had reached the enormous figure of over six millions, the census of 1821 showing the inhabitants of Ireland to be 6,801,827. The increase from an estimated one million and thirty-four thousand in 1695 was, according to Malthus, probably without parallel in Europe. According to Petty, the inhabitants in 1672 numbered about one million one hundred thousand, living in two hundred thousand houses, of which 160,000 were “wretched, nasty cabins without chimney, window or door-shut, and wholly unfit for making merchantable butter, cheese, or the manufacture of woollen, linen or leather.” In 1695, the war on behalf of James II. having intervened, the population as estimated by South was 1,034,000. When the people were next counted in 1731, by a not incorrect method in the hands of the magistracy and Protestant clergy, they were found to have almost doubled, the total being 2,010,221. This increase, the exactness of which depends naturally upon the accuracy of Petty’s and South’s 17th century estimates, had been made notwithstanding the famines and epidemics of 1718 and 1728, and an excessive emigration, mostly of Protestants, to the West Indian and American colonies, which was itself attended by a great loss of life through disease. For the rest of the 18th century, the estimates of population are based upon the number of houses that paid the hearth-tax. In the following figures six persons are reckoned to each taxed hearth: Year Persons 1754 2,372,634 1767 2,544,276 1777 2,690,556 1785 2,845,932