A MILLION OF BABIES.

Te Aroha News, Volume VII, Issue 445, 12 February 1890, Page 3

A MILLION OF BABIES.

Take your pencil and follow me, while we figure out what will happen to the 1,000,000 of babies that will have been born in the last 1,000,000 seconds. I believe that is about the average—* one every time the clock ticks.’ One year hence, if statistics don’t belie us, w© will have lost 150,000 of these little 4 prides of the household.’ A year later 53,000 more will be keeping company with those that have gone before. At the end of the third year we find that 22,000 more have dropped by the wayside. The fourth year they have become rugged little darlings, not nearly so susceptible to infantile diseases, only 8,000 having succumbed to the rigors imposed by tha master. By the time they have arrived at the age of twelve years but a paltry few hundred leave the track each year. After threescore years have come and gone we find less trouble in counting the army with which *we started in the fall of 1889.

Of the 1,000,000 with which we began our count but 370,000 remain; 630,000 have gone the way of all the world, and the remaining few have forgotten that they ever existed. At the end of eighty, or, taking our mode of reckoning, by the year 1969 a.d., there are still 97,000 grey-haired, shaky old grannies and grandfathers, toothless, hairless and happy. In the year 1984 our 1,000,000 babies with which we started in 1889 will have dwindled to an insignificant 223 helpless old wrecks, • stranded on the shores of time.’ In 1992 all but seventeen have left this mundane sphere for ever, while the last remaining wreck will probably, in seeming thoughtlessness, watch the sands filter through the hour-glass of time, and die in the year 1997 at the age of one hundred and eight. What a bounteous supply of food for re flection !