ABSTRACT
For those readers who still delight in statistics: In 1914, the underground population of New York, not counting the fecund fish in the Aquarium, was one billion rats and mice, thirty-two thousand subway guards and scavengers along the subterranean tracks, who with their long forks pronged the rails like minor devils, ten thousand rag-pickers, junk dealers, shoemakers, pool-room keepers and janitors who spent their lives in basements—and omitting, of course, the uncomputable dead in all the cemeteries who were trying to rise to the surface. The overhead population consisted of the few pioneer dwellers in penthouses, the handful of bird fanciers who still flew pigeons, one million sparrows and other birds in the trees, and the paralyzed and elephantiasic who could only look out of upper story windows on the street life below. But the heavy flow of life, the cream and soot, the blood and the muck was in the vast middle layer that lived on the ground. Nearly eight millions. Whew!
