With tongue in cheek he wrote Alfred, Lord Tennyson, to suggest a correction for the poet’s couplet: “Every minute dies a man, / Every minute one is born.” I need hardly point out to you that this calculation would tend to keep the sum total of the world’s population in a state of perpetual equipoise, whereas it is a well-known fact that the said sum total is constantly on the increase. I would therefore take the liberty of suggesting that in the next edition of your excellent poem the erroneous calculation to which I refer should be corrected as follows: “Every moment dies a man / And one and
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