gentleman took a fancy to a horse, and the dealer, to induce him to buy, offered the animal for the value of the twenty-fourth nail in his shoe, reckoning one cent for the first nail, two for the second, four for the third, and so on. The gentleman, thinking the price very low, accepted the offer. What was the price of the horse?
On calculating, it will be found that the twenty-fourth term of the progression 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, etc., is 8,388,608, or $83,886.08, a sum which is more than any horse, even the best Arabian, was ever sold for.
Had the price of the horse been fixed at the value of all the nails, the sum would have been double the above price less the first term, or $167,772.15.
A QUESTION OF POPULATION
he following note on the result of unrestrained propagation for one hundred generations is taken from "Familiar Lectures on Scientific Subjects," by Sir John F. W. Herschel:
For the benefit of those who discuss the subjects of population, war, pestilence, famine, etc., it may be as well to mention that the number of human beings living at the end of the hundredth generation, commencing from a single pair, doubling at each generation (say in thirty years), and allowing for each man, woman, and child, an average space of four feet in height and one foot square, would form a vertical column, having for its base the whole surface of the earth and sea spread out into a plane, and for its height 3,674 times the sun's distance from the earth! The number of human strata thus piled, one on the other, would amount to 460,790,000,000,000.
In this connection the following facts in regard to the present population of the globe may be of interest: