o a marriage. Mr Sadler's answer
has amused us much. He denies the accuracy of our counting, and, by
reckoning all the Scotch and Irish peers as peers of the United Kingdom,
certainly makes very different numbers from those which we gave. A
member of the Parliament of the United Kingdom might have been expected,
we think, to know better what a peer of the United Kingdom is.

By taking the Scotch and Irish peers, Mr Sadler has altered the average.
But it is considerably higher than the average fecundity of England,
and still, therefore, constitutes an unanswerable argument against his
theory.

The shifts to which, in this difficulty, he has recourse, are
exceedingly diverting. "The average fecundity of the marriages of
peers," said we, "is higher by one-fifth than the average fecundity of
marriages throughout the kingdom."

"Where, or by whom did the Reviewer find it supposed," answers Mr
Sadler, "that the registered baptisms expressed the full fecundity of
the marriages of England?"

Assuredly, if the registers of England are so defective as to explain
the difference which, on our calculation, exists between the fecundity
of the peers and the fecundity of the people, no argument against Mr
Sadler's theory can be drawn from that difference. But what becomes
of all the other arguments which Mr Sadler has founded on these very
registers? Above all, what becomes of his comparison between the
censuses of England and France? In the pamphlet before us, he dwells
with great complacency on a coincidence which seems to him to support
his theory, and which to us seems, of itself, sufficient to overthrow
it.

"In my table of the population of France in the forty-four departments
in which there are from one to two hectares to each inhabitant, the
fecundity of 100 marriages, calculated on the average of the results of
the three computations relating to different periods given in my table,
is 406 7/10. In the twenty-two counties of England in which there is
from one to two hectares to each inhabitant, or from 129 to 259 on the
square mile,--beginning, therefore, with Huntingdonshire, and ending
with Worcestershire,--the whole number of marriages during ten years
will be found to amount to 379,624, and the whole number of the births
during the same term to 1,545,549--or 407 1/10 births to 100 marriages!
A difference of one in one thousand only, compared with the French
proportion!"

Does not Mr Sadler see that, if the registers