A MILLION OF BABIES.

Waikato Times, Volume XXXIV, Issue 2754, 8 March 1890, Page 6 (Supplement)

A MILLION OF BABIES.

Take your pencil and follow me, while we-figure on what will happen to the 100,000,000 of babies that will have been born in the last 100,000,000 seconds. . I believe that is about the average— " one every time the clock ticks." One year hence, , if'statistics don't belie us, we .will have lost 150,000 of these little " 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 25,000 more liave dropped by the wayside.' 1 ' 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 the master.' / , By tho time they hive arrived'at the age of 12 years but a paltry few hundred leave the track each year. .. After three score years have" come and gone wo find les9 trouble in counting the ariny with which we started in 1889. Of the 1,000,000 with which we began our count, but 370,000 remain ; 630,000 have gone the way of the world, and the remaining few have forgotten that they ever existed. At the end of 80, or, taking our mode of reckoning, by the year 1969 ad., 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 17 have left this inundate sphere, for ever, while the last remaining wreck will probably, in seeming thoughtlessness, watch the sands filter thiough the hour glass of time, and die in the year 1997 at the age of 108. What a bounteous supply of food for reflection!