The number and geographical distribution of the chosen people of Israel is of great significance in its bearing upon the question of their origin.[2] While, owing to their fluid ubiquitousness, it is exceedingly difficult to enumerate them exactly, probability indicates that there are to-day, the world over, between eight and nine million Jews. Of these, six or seven million are inhabitants of Europe, the remainder being sparsely scattered over the whole earth, from one end to the other. Their distribution in Europe, as our map opposite shows, is exceedingly uneven. Fully one half of these descendants of Jacob reside in Russia, there being four or five million Jews in that country alone. Austria-Hungary stands next in order, with two million odd souls. After these two there is a wide gap. No other European country is comparable with them except it be Germany and Roumania with their six or seven hundred thousand each. The British Isles contain relatively few, possibly one hundred thousand, these being principally in London. They are very rare in Scotland and Ireland--only a thousand or fifteen hundred apiece. Holland contains also about a hundred thousand, half of them in the celebrated Ghetto at Amsterdam. Then follow France with eighty thousand more or less, and Italy with perhaps two thirds as many. From Scandinavia they have always been rigidly excluded, from Sweden till the beginning and from Norway until nearly the middle of this century. Spain, although we hear much of the Spanish Jew, contains practically no indigenous Israelites. It is estimated that there were once about a million there settled, but the persecutions of the fifteenth century drove them forth all over Europe, largely to the Balkan states and Africa. There are a good many along these Mediterranean shores of Africa, principally in Morocco and Tripoli. The number decreases as we approach Egypt and Palestine, the ancient center of Jewish dispersion. As to America, it is estimated, although we know nothing certainly, that there are about a half million Jews scattered through our cities in the United States. New York city, according to the last census, contained about eighty thousand Poles and Russians, most of whom, it may be assumed, were Jews. But they have come since in ever-increasing numbers, with the great exodus from Russia, at the rate of scores of thousands annually. A recent writer places their present number in New York city at a quarter of a million. The British provinces, on the other hand, do not seem to offer great attractions; as late as 1870, for example, the census in Nova Scotia could not discover a solitary Jew.