of England, which are
notoriously very defective, give a result exactly corresponding almost
to an unit with that obtained from the registers of France, which are
notoriously very full and accurate, this proves the very reverse of what
he employs it to prove? The correspondence of the registers proves that
there is no correspondence in the facts. In order to raise the average
fecundity of England even to the level of the average fecundity of
the peers of the three kingdoms, which is 3.81 to a marriage, it is
necessary to add nearly six per cent. to the number of births given in
the English registers. But, if this addition be made, we shall have,
in the counties of England, from Huntingdonshire to Worcestershire
inclusive, 4.30 births to a marriage or thereabouts: and the boasted
coincidence between the phenomena of propagation in France and
England disappears at once. This is a curious specimen of Mr Sadler's
proficiency in the art of making excuses. In the same pamphlet he
reasons as if the same registers were accurate to one in a thousand, and
as if they were wrong at the very least by one in eighteen.

He tries to show that we have not taken a fair criterion of the
fecundity of the peers. We are not quite sure that we understand his
reasoning on this subject. The order of his observations is more than
usually confused, and the cloud of words more than usually thick. We
will give the argument on which he seems to lay most stress in his own
words:--

"But I shall first notice a far more obvious and important blunder
into which the Reviewer has fallen; or into which, I rather fear, he
knowingly wishes to precipitate his readers, since I have distinctly
pointed out what ought to have preserved him from it in the very chapter
he is criticising and contradicting. It is this:--he has entirely
omitted 'counting' the sterile marriages of all those peerages which
have become extinct during the very period his counting embraces. He
counts, for instance, Earl Fitzwilliam, his marriages, and heir; but has
he not omitted to enumerate the marriages of those branches of the same
noble house, which have become extinct since that venerable individual
possessed his title? He talks of my having appealed merely to the
extinction of peerages in my argument; but, on his plan of computation,
extinctions are perpetually and wholly lost sight of. In computing
the average prolificness of the marriages of the nobles, he positively
counts fro