Year. Population. Year. Population. 1656 1,000 1820 123,706 1673 2,500 1825 166,089 1696 4,302 1830 202,589 1731 8,628 1835 270,068 1756 10,381 1840 312,852 1773 21,876 1845 371,223 1786 23,614 1850 515,394 1790 33,131 1855 629,810 1800 60,489 1860 814,254 1810 96,373 1864 1,000,000+ Taking the first census as a point of departure, the population of New York doubled itself in about eleven years. During the first century it increased a little more than tenfold. It was doubled again in less than twenty years; the next thirty years quadrupled it; and another period of twenty years doubled it once more. Its next duplication consumed the shorter term of eighteen years. It more than doubled again during the fifteen years preceding the last census; and the four years since that census have witnessed an increase of nearly twenty-three per cent. This final estimate is of course liable to correction by next year's census, but its error will be found on the side of under-statement, rather than of exaggeration. The property on the north-west corner of Broadway and Chamber Street, now occupied in part by one of Delmonico's restaurants, was purchased by a New York citizen, but lately deceased, for the sum of $1,000: its present value is $125,000. A single Broadway lot, surveyed out of an estate which cost the late John Jay $500 per acre, was recently sold at auction for $80,000, and the purchaser has refused a rent of $16,000 per annum, or twenty per cent on his purchase-money, for the store which he has erected on the property. In 1826, the estimated total value of real estate in the city of New York was $64,804,050. In 1863, it had reached a total of $402,196,652, thus increasing more than sixfold within the lifetime of an ordinary business-generation. In 1826, the personal estate of New York City, so far as could be arrived at for official purposes, amounted to $42,434,981. In 1863, the estimate of this class of property-values was $192,000,161. It had thus more than quadrupled in a generation. But statistics are most eloquent through illustration. Let us look discursively about the city of New York at various periods of her career since the opening of the present century. I shall assume that a map of the city is everywhere attainable, and that the reader has a general acquaintance with the physical and political geography of the United States.