----------------+-----------------+---------------+-------------- | Area in British | Population | Population to | square miles | | square mile ----------------+-----------------+---------------+-------------- Europe | 3,700,000 | 320,000,000 | 86 Asia | 17,000,000 | 830,000,000 | 47 Africa | 12,000,000 | 200,000,000 | 16 North America | | | (including | 8,600,000 | 68,000,000 | 8 West Indies) | | | South America | 7,000,000 | 28,000,000 | 4 Oceania | 3,000,000 | 4,000,000 | 1 ----------------+-----------------+---------------+-------------- Europe is, therefore, relatively to its size, by much the most populous division of the globe, though Asia contains the highest number of inhabitants--amounting, indeed, to little less than two-thirds of the entire human race. The New World is very much less populated by man than the older known portions of the globe, though its capabilities for the support of man fully equal those of any of the continents of the Eastern Hemisphere. Australia, and the scattered islands of the Pacific Ocean, are the least populous portions of the earth, the total present number of their inhabitants amounting to a mere fraction of the entire number.[13] The numerical distribution of mankind undergoes great change in the present day, when emigration from over-populated lands to distant parts of the globe is conducted on so extensive a scale. But this affects the distribution of _race_ in much higher measure than it does the merely numerical distribution of man. The fast-increasing numbers of the settlers in the fertile plains and river valleys of the New World, descendants of European colonists, perhaps hardly more than replaces, numerically, the native races who occupied the same regions prior to the first visit of the white man to their shores. It is the tendency, everywhere, of the native races to decay before the white settler. Wars, famine, epidemic diseases, and various social causes, again, tend to keep down the total number of the human family--at any rate, to check the more rapid numerical growth which it would otherwise exhibit.