The checks to population existing in Africa seem to be chiefly of the positive kind. Incessant warfare, with death by famine or epidemics, are described by the early travellers on that Continent, Park and Bruce, as carrying off whole tribes. Park states that, independently of violent causes, the struggle for food is so great in most African states, that longevity is rare among the negroes. At forty, most of them become grayhaired and covered with wrinkles, and but few of them survive the age of fifty-five or sixty. There was, in his day, but little difficulty in obtaining slaves in times of famine in Africa, as even free negroes were often so pressed with hunger as to entreat, according to Dr. Laidley, to be put on his slave-chain, to save them from starvation. Bruce reports that, in many of the tribes, women begin to be mothers at the age of eleven: and to such a life of privation and care does this rapid reproduction lead, that he speaks of the women in some States near Abyssinia as becoming, at the age of twenty-two, “more wrinkled and deformed by age, than an European woman is at sixty.” Mr. Malthus, after a very curious account of the checks to population in Northern and Southern Siberia, then passes on in chapter x., to treat of the Turkish Dominions and Persia, and his remarks are especially interesting to our modern politicians. The fundamental cause of the low rate of increase of population in Turkey, he truly remarks, is undoubtedly the nature of the Turkish government. Its tyranny, its feebleness, its bad laws, and worse administration of them, with the consequent insecurity of property, throw such obstacles in the way of agriculture, that the means of subsistence are necessarily decreasing yearly, and with them, of course, the number of people. It is calculated at the present day that population would double only once in 555 years in Turkey, owing to the positive checks caused by its wretched government. The population of modern Turkey is about 28 millions, or only some 16 persons per square mile; and, in 1876, it was stated in governmental reports that the population of the empire was fast declining, and its cultivated lands falling into the condition of deserts. In Europe, as in Asia, we are informed by Malthus, it was the maxim of Turkish policy, originating in the feebleness of government, and the fear of popular tumults, to keep the price of corn low in all the considerable towns. “When Constantinople is in want of provisions, ten provinces are perhaps famished for a supply. At Damascus, during the scarcity of 1784, the people paid only one penny farthing a pound for their bread, whilst the peasants in the villages were actually dying with hunger.”