Madrid 4,194 Barcelona 1,365 Seville 887 Valladolid 828 Granada 617 Valencia 624 Santiago 403 Saragossa 389 Salamanca 242 Oviedo 155 The course of study pursued in these institutions is substantially the same as that in other countries: 2,040 of the students are in the Philosophical and Literary course, 1,617 in the Exact Sciences, Physics, and so forth; while Law, Theology, and Medicine include the rest. Some of these universities once had a reputation as wide as the civilized part of the world, and students from all nations flocked to them as to the purest and sweetest fountains of knowledge in the earth. At Salamanca, where now there are less than 250 students, there were 10,000 in the fourteenth century, and its reputation has been higher than Oxford’s. It was at this university that the Copernican system of astronomy was held and taught, when the Romish Church denounced it as heretical and contrary to the Holy Scriptures. Yet even here Columbus could make no impression in favor of his theory of another continent, but all his arguments were treated with the greatest contempt by the learned men of the university of Salamanca. The professors of the modern school, which still retains the name and distinctions of the days of its glory, get $600 a year for their services, and that is probably an index of the estimation in which learning is held in these decayed and benighted regions. The present population of Spain, making due allowance for increase since the last estimate, is about 16,400,000. It is therefore the _eighth_ of the European powers in numbers, Italy and Turkey being both ahead of it. The increase of population in Spain is only at the rate of less than the half of one per hundred annually. At this rate the number would double only once in 181 years, placing Spain behind every country in Europe, in this respect, except poor Austria. She doubles once in 198 years; then Spain; then France, once in 122 years; Holland, once in 80 years; Scotland, once in 46 years; Prussia, once in 41 years; England and Wales, once in 29 years.