The Abbeville banner. [volume] (Abbeville, S.C.) 1847-1869, 1848-01-19
From Chambers Journal.

with the game Of chess, which had been
devised for his amusement, that he desired
the inventor to name his own reward
The philosopher, however. was too modest
to seize the opportunity of enrlching himself,
he merely beg ggcd Of his royal master a
grain ofcorn for each square on the chess
table, doubling the number in proceeding
from the first to the sixty-fourth square
The King, honorng his moderation, made
nc scruple of consenting to the demand,
b' ION his treasurer making the necessary
ci culations, he was somewhat surprised TO
Fl ithathe had engaged to give away the i'm
F ksiblc quantity ofS7 7,O76, ,525, ,54G,692, $50
sfains of corn, equal to the whole contained
in 1884 towns, each having 1924 grana
ries Of l74s762 measures each consisting of
32,768 grains.
The story Of the horseshoe is of the same
kind, and like the above IS usually met
with in books Of scientific recreation.
A man selling IL fine horse is to receive for
1t nothing more than the value OF the twen-
ty-fourth nail of the animals shoes, suppo-
sing that the first nail is worth Earlhing
and so on, doubling each time. The bar
gain is tolerable good one, since the 24th
W ".
Suppose that of all the prodigious num-
ber of eggs in female herring, only 1000
come to maturity, and that each of them in
its turn gives birth to the same number,
half males, and half females. In the second
year, we should have afalniIy of 100000,
in the third, of 2,OOO,OOO,OOO; and in the
eighth, the number would be expressed by
the figure 2 followed by 24 ciphers. This
number of herrings would not find room
even ii the earth were turned into globe
OF water, as its whole volume would furnish
only about square inch for each fish.
A sum of money invested at five per cent.
compound interest, is doubled in fourteen
years and some months, quadruplcd in less
than thirty years, octuplcd in less than forty
five years, and so on. From this it would
oppcar that if a centimc had been placed
out at such interest, pro bona publico, in the
year 800, when Charlemagne was crowned
Emperor of the West, the 3O,OOO,0OO
Frenchmen inhabiting the country at the
Revolution in 1880, would have enjoyed an
income of 100000, 100000 francs. Such
arithmcticaly true, but economically i'm
possible results Of old deposits, are made the
groundwork Of some works of fiction but
writers of another class are obliged to at
tend 10 The obvious fact, that in order to eff.
feet such accumulation of capital, the bust
ness of the bankers and the wealth of the
community would require to increase in the
same proportion. Money does not breed
spontaneously. The party to whom it is
entrusted must use his funds in such a way
as to enable him not only to pay the inter-
est butto derive profit from the transaction.
A sprig of henbane sometimes produces
$4,000 grains but if we take the average
at 10000 the number of sprigs in the eighth
generation would be expressed by l6 CT
pliers. AT this rate it would take nearly
the entire surface Of the globe to contain all
the henbane produced from single plant
in four years.
A hundred pebbles were arranged in
line, six feet apart, with basket six feet
ahead of the first pebble, in which man,
tor wager, was to place the stones, one by
one, in as little time as his comrade would
take to walk from the Luxembourg to the
Chateau of Meuden and back again. The
distance between these two points is 10000
yards, or 6O,6OO going and returning; and
this is the exact distance the stone gatherer
world have to walk by making separate
journey from the basket for each of his peb-
bles. But the latter would not only have
to walk, but to stoop and rise again hun
dred times; and, in effect, so great him
drance was this, that he had only deposited
his eighty fifth stone by the time the other
had completed his task.
The population of the globe is supposed
to be under thousand millions, or accord
ing to M. Hassel, 937, ,e55,OOO. If, then,
saysa French writer, all mankind were
collected in one place, every four ndividu-
ais occupying square metre, the whole
might be contained in field ten miles
square. Thus, generally speaking, the
population of country might be packed,
without much squeezing, in its capital
Butthe main idea this gives us Of the
number of the human race, IS counterbal-
anced by its capability of extention. The
new world is said 10 contain productive
land 100000 square miles of middIing
quality. each capable of supporting two