Democratic Sentinel, Volume 13, Number 30, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 16 August 1889 — THE BABIES OF THE WORLD. [ARTICLE]

THE BABIES OF THE WORLD.

M*arly Thlrty-Saven Millon of Them Appear Every Year. It has been computed that between 86,000,000 and 87,000,000 of babies are born into the world each year. The rate of production is therefore about seventy a minute or rather more than one for every beat of the clock With the one-minute calculation every reader is familiar, but it is not everyone who stops to calculate what this means when it comes to a year’s supply. And it will probably, therefore, startle a good many persons to find on the authority of a writer in the Hospital that could the infants of a year be ranged in a line of cradles seven deep they would go round the world. We have the ingenious conclusion also that, supposing the little ones to grow up and the sexes to be about equally divided, we should have an army a hundred times as large as the forces of the British empire, with a wife in addition to every soldier. The same writer looks at the matter in a still more picturesque light. He imagines the babies being carried past a given point in their mothers’ charge one by one. and the procession being kept up continuously night and day until the last comer in the. twelvemonth had passed by. A sufficiently liberal rate of speed is allowed, but even with these babies in arms going past twenty a minute the reviewing officer would only have seen ti sixth part of the infantile host file onward by the time he had been a year at his post. In other words, the babe that had to be carried when the work began would to toddle onward itself when a mere fraction of its comardes had reached the * saluting post, and when the year’s supply of babies was tapering to a close ther" would be a rear guard not of infants, but of romping boys and girls. They would have passed, in fact, out of the maternal arms into the hands of the school-teacher. Every moment of nearly seven years would be required to complete this grand parade of those little ones that in the course of a twelvemonth begin to play their part in, the age of man.