An estimate of the comparative strength of Britain during the present and four preceding reigns; and of the losses of her trade from every war since the Revolution ... To which is added an essay on population / by the Lord Chief Justice Hale.
- George Chalmers
- Date:
- 1782
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: An estimate of the comparative strength of Britain during the present and four preceding reigns; and of the losses of her trade from every war since the Revolution ... To which is added an essay on population / by the Lord Chief Justice Hale. Source: Wellcome Collection.
197/210 page 183
![I >83 ] APPENDIX. X^HAT the Reader may expedl in the following Essay on * ' Population, is nothing more than-4he tenth chapter of that elaborate performance,, primitive Origination of Mankind confdered'y by the Lord Chief Justice Hale ; a book, which, if piety of purpofe, ability of performance, and candour of dif- quilition, are eftimable qualities, ought to occupy every clofet, as well as the cabinets of the curious. The Editor thought he could not offer a more valuable prefent to the public, than the mature fentiments of fo great a mafter of evidence, and fo judi- cious a writer, with regard to an interefting fubjedt, which has lately engaged the pens of the ingenious and the learned : and the original volume, which is only in the hands of the few, is of fo great a bulk, as to repel rather than invite perufal. Though this performance “ was written^ as Lord Hale remarks in his preface, at leifure and broken times^ and with great intervals^' it appears to have been corredled by him for the prefs in 1675 : He defired his readers pardon in that in my tranfcript of fome entire texts out of Arifiotle, Plato, Plutarch, and others, I ufe the Latin tranflation, and not the original Greek, wherein the authors wrote: I was a better Grecian in the i6th, than in the 66th year of my life : and my application to another ftudy and profeffion, rendered my fkill in that language of little ufe to me, and fol wore it out by degrees.” Sir Matthew Hale was born in November 1609: he died in December 1676. And “ Hhe primitive Ori- gination of Mankind confderedy' was firfl publifhed in 1677. “WE are not now inquiring what the wife and glorious God might or could do, in order to the equable reduftion of the world, upon a fuppofition of an eter- nal duration: But, we are upon a queftion of fadi indeed, namely, What he hath done, and whether, upon the fuppofition of all thofe redudtives inftanced in the former chapter, at leaft without the wife and intelligent regimen of God, they](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b28757671_0197.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
