=Quantity versus quality.=--The reader will understand how it is that anyone writing from the biological standpoint must view with something like contempt the common assumption that, in international competition, mere statistics of population furnish, as such, final and adequate data for prophecy. Let us remind ourselves once more that, according to these crude criteria, which were really superseded untold æons ago, the dominance of the world must belong in the near future not to Russia, with its balance of more than two million births per annum, rather than to France, with its approximately stationary population, but to the bacteria, the growth of population amongst which, if it be not controlled by the less fertile creature we call man, may be of simply inexpressible magnitude. But the world is not, and will not be, ruled by bacteria, their fertility notwithstanding. Indeed, the disease-producing bacteria have already had sentence of death pronounced upon them by the higher intelligence of man, and that sentence will be carried out within a century. Similarly within the bounds of humanity we must recognise the limitations of mere statistics. The population of France, some forty years ago, consisted of so many millions of units. The figure does not matter,--let us put it at 30,000,001. Now that 1, so to say, was called Louis Pasteur, and from the point of view of statistics or those who think they can predict history by counting heads, he was only an almost infinitesimal fraction, about one-thirty-millionth part, of the French people. Yet, as Huxley pointed out long ago, his mind sufficed to pay the entire indemnity exacted from France after the Franco-Prussian war. This single unit was worth more than a host of soldiers of the merely mechanical kind. Or take Athens, with its population of 30,000 people, mostly slaves, and consider its influence upon the world. Or, indeed, go where you please, whether to the history of nations or the history of religion or science or art, and ask whether the counting of heads, the ordinary census taking which indeed amounts merely to weighing nations by the ton, is an adequate one. In estimating national capital by the methods of vital statistics alone, we are in a far worse case than he would be who estimated monetary wealth by numbers of coins, without considering whether they were pounds, shillings or pence, whether they were genuine or counterfeit. The illustration is ludicrously inadequate, as every illustration must be, simply because the human case is unique. In the units of a population, which many prophets treat as if they were all of equal value, there are not merely differences to which the difference between a sovereign and a penny offers no parallel; there is not merely an enormous quantity of bogus or counterfeit units, but there is a very large number of units in every population which, so far from adding to the value of the rest, subtract from it, are parasitic upon it.