Show THE NUMBER OF THE DEAD IT is eAmmon commonly ly supposed that intermingling with the soil of a very large portion of the earths surface are the ashes of human remains upon this assumption is based a favorite argument against the resurrection to the effect that the substance that once nce composed compo ged human bodies has become so thoroughly and in such large proportion commingled with the soil that to raise those bodies would be to raise a great part of the surface layers of the earth itself in localities that have long been thickly populated but the notion that the earth is one vast human cemetery is utterly erroneous as is shown in a paper written by W C prime L and published in the new york journal of commerce from which we take the following the population of the earth is now about suppose the human race to have existed for years and to have been always as aa great as now in years you have 60 centuries in each century you may count three generations of mankind or one hundred and eighty generations erat ions in all each being a generation of bowlay now lay oct a cemetery for one generation it will be a huge estimate to give to every man woman and child a grave five feet by two or ten square feet you want for your grave yard then square feet of ground A square mile contains something less than square feet you want then a graveyard not 55 miles long by 10 wide for your whole generation now multiply this by and you have your burial ground for years of mankind that is a strip of land 1800 miles long by 55 miles wide will be ample in other words a cemetery containing square miles would be sufficient for the entire human ram race to lie side aide by side the estimate which I 1 have given you of continuous population la is obviously enormously large the estimate of the size of each grave is very large A strictly correct estimate would reduce the size of the required cemetery more than one half but enormous as it is you could lay out your burial ground for all men who have lived on earth so that they could lie side by side in arizona or in california or you could lay it out in texas large enough to accommodate the race of years past and also the race for years yet to come all sleeping sleeping nj in the soil of that hat on one s state of this union but some one says the race of man has been on earth years years that is a pure imagination and there Is not so far as I 1 know a fact on which to rest it but suppose it is true and suppose the population always what it now Is you have provided for years of it you want nearly 17 times as large a cemetery for the generations of a thousand centuries that is you want square miles in it lay it out whenever you please 1700 miles long by 1000 wide it is but a part of the united states and so enormously large have been the rough estimates thus far used it is safe to say may that if the human race has been in existence years a separate grave could be provided for every individual of the race within a part of the united states east of the mississippi river the foregoing was written without any apparent intention of advocating any doctrine of scripture or religion but merely to correct in a scientific and irrefutable manner certain popular but erroneous ideas the same writer continues in a somewhat curious strain showing that the amount of space actually in dispensable to the comfortable existence of a dense population of living human beings is not nearly so great as is generally supposed provided the city containing them be properly laid out and its buildings suitably constructed his conclusions evidently have no BO IB intended tended application to the city whose dimensions are described in the apocalypse but they serve to illustrate what an enormous population that city would accommodate |