As to the checks to population in Persia, the dreadful convulsions to which that country has been subject for many hundred years must have been fatal to her agriculture. The periods of repose from external wars and internal commotions have been short and few, and even during the times of profound peace, the frontier provinces were constantly subject to the ravages of the Tartars. Hence the slow increase. One of the most valuable parts of the _Essay on Population_ is that wherein Mr. Malthus treats of the checks to population in Hindostan and Tibet. In Hindostan, according to the ordinance of Menu, the Indian legislator, marriage is very greatly encouraged, and a male heir is considered as an object of the first importance. Hindoo maidens are married at the age of eleven, and even younger: and become mothers before they attain the age of twelve. For such reasons, Hindostan has been one of the most noted countries in the world for devastations, epidemics, and famines. The lower classes have for centuries been reduced to the extremest poverty, and compelled to adopt the most frugal and scanty mode of subsistence. Whilst the average annual income per head in England was calculated, by Mr. Henry Fawcett in 1870, at about some eighteen pounds; in Hindostan, it was lately stated by Mr. J. Bright, that about two or three pounds sterling for food is all a Hindoo peasant gets. And, as Lord Derby remarked in his admirable Rochdale speech in 1879, the people of Hindostan seem to be a marked example of how very low a standard of living a nation may people down to. Recent years have made us familiar with the tales of Indian famines; but there is nothing novel in these in the history of that long over-peopled country. One of the Jesuits cited by Malthus says that it is impossible for him to describe the misery to which he was witness during the two years’ famine in 1737 and 1738, and another Jesuit writes, “Every year we baptize a thousand children, whom their parents can no longer feed, or who, being likely to die, are sold to us by their mothers in order to get rid of them.”