It is without doubt, says our author, owing to the preventive check to population, as much as to any peculiar healthiness of air, that the mortality of Norway is so low. In every country the principal mortality takes place among very young children; and the smaller number of these in Norway, in proportion to the whole population, will naturally occasion a smaller mortality than in other countries, supposing the climate to be equally healthy. The population of Norway is now about 1,800,000, a very large accession since the days of Malthus, and there has of late years been a very large emigration from that country to the United States, which indicates that, in all probability, there will soon be less of prudential restraint in the matter of births, and hence, doubtless, a higher death-rate than at the commencement of this century. The former low death-rate of Norway, one in 48, is not attained to at present by almost any European State except Norway. It is little more than 20 per 1000 per annum. Malthus mentions in his work that Norway is almost the only country in Europe where a traveller will hear any apprehensions expressed of a redundant population, and where the danger to the happiness of the lower classes of people from this cause, is in some degree seen and understood. “This obviously arises from the smallness of the population altogether and the consequent narrowness of the subject. If our attention were confined to one parish, and there were no power of emigrating from it, the most careless observer could not fail to remark that, if all married at twenty, it would be perfectly impossible for the farmers, however carefully they might improve their land, to find employment and food for those that would grow up; but when a great number of these parishes are added together in a populous kingdom, the largeness of the subject and the power of moving from place to place obscure and confuse our view. We lose sight of a truth which before appeared completely obvious; and in a most unaccountable manner attribute to the aggregate quantity of land a power of supporting people beyond comparison greater than the sum of all its parts.” In Sweden, in Mr. Malthus’ day, the inhabitants of the towns were only one-thirtieth part of the whole population; and the mortality, when Malthus wrote, seems to have been as high as one in 35. The proportion of yearly marriages he found, in Sweden, to be about one in 112: varying from one in 100, in good years, to one in 124, in bad ones. When it is remembered that the marriage-rate in Norway was but one in 135, against one in 112 in Sweden, the reason of the high death-rate is at once explained.