It has happened in the course of some five or six thousand years after the creation of the world, that a small island, lying in the seas which border on the northern part of Europe—a spot of earth so comparatively small that it may be traversed from one end to the other in the space of little more than a week—has, by the artificial state of its society, and a concourse of injudicious regulations, increased in its population to about seventeen millions of inhabitants; and because, as must necessarily be the case from the influence of these regulations, a number of the people are in impoverished circumstances, and are not so well fed as their neighbours, it has, forsooth, pleased a few men in this large mass of humanity to impeach the God of the universe, and to tell us that He creates millions of thinking beings only to put them to death by starvation. To show the utter fallacy of this detestable theory, I need only bring under your notice two simple facts, in which all such vicious and shallow-minded reasoning finds an insurmountable obstacle to its establishment. It is a great, a comforting, and an undeniable fact, that there are immense tracts of land, islands, and even continents, which till this hour are lying in nearly their primeval state, with the soil untouched since the beginning of the world. So boundless are these almost uninhabited territories, so capable are they of sustaining human life, that, if the proper means were used, they would yield food, clothing, and a place of residence to more people than all that the ancient settlements of the human race at present contain. They could hold all the existing population of the earth, and not be filled. Canada itself could receive and maintain the whole of the population of Europe; and the seventeen millions of human beings belonging to the little island which has raised such alarm, might be transported to the banks of one of the mighty rivers in the United States, and it would hardly be known that they had taken up their residence in the country. “Send us over your whole population (says an American writer); we have plenty of room for you all, and a hundred millions more.” But such a gratifying fact as this gives but a faint idea of the vastness, the capabilities of the world beyond the waters of the Atlantic. In one of the numbers of the Journal, I presented the account given by the ingenious naturalist Audubon, of the wild pigeons of America. Have my readers any recollection of the extraordinary number of these animals, and the calculation made regarding the quantity of their daily food? Let me here repeat and extend the calculation. The number of pigeons seen on the wing by Audubon, as computed by allowing two pigeons to the square yard, was _one billion, one hundred and fifteen millions, one hundred and thirty-six thousand_, and “as every pigeon (says he) daily consumes fully half a pint of food, the quantity necessary for