We were looking this morning at an old Atlas of the world that we have had for quite some time. That 'some time' dated from an event a number of years back, in fact, when we noticed a large number of boxed books put out for garbage collection on our street, while we were headed onward for one of our daily ravine walks. As book lovers, we simply could not understand how anyone might want to relinquish books to a rubbish-heap.

So we stopped, regardless of  how it might seem to an onlooker to see two people rummaging through discarded books set out for city waste, to have a look at what was being so cavalierly disposed of.  This book from Everyman's Encyclopaedia was a 'supplementary volume', titled World Atlas and Index of Maps. I had been curious about how close Russia was to Syria, having seen mention in the news of 'border' issues. And although we have far more recent and up-to-date atlases in our library, this neat little compendium of maps always intrigues us.

It is, of course, badly outdated, but the essentials are there. Published in 1932, it is fascinating to look at how the world has changed since then; country name-changes no longer reflective of what was then current in the days when colonialist powers still held huge influence over the countries they dominated. Countries like the State of Israel, the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, and The People's Republic of Bangladesh, for example, not even on the world stage. Along with Burundi, Central African Republic, North Korea, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, among others.

And to see statistics relevant to the time, of "races of the world", the very concept of which is repugnant to modern humanity recognizing the reality of one human race, with ethnic divisions. At that time 'Mongolian' was the considered race with an estimated 655 million souls, along with 'Caucasian' with slightly fewer at 640, 'Negro' at 190 million, 'Semitic' with 81 million, 'Malayan' at 52 million and 'Red Indian' with 23 million.

Just as interesting was the divisions within global society relating to religions up to 1930. Christianity divided between Roman Catholics at 273 million, Orthodox Catholics at 120 million, Protestants at 172 million, then Confucians at 301 million, 'Mohammedans' with 222 million, Animists with 158 million Buddhists with 138 million, Shintoists at 28 million, Jews with 12 million, and 'others' at 15 million.

Time, and history and a burgeoning birthrate has done much to change all of that. Six million Jews, for one thing, perished in the Holocaust; their number globally now stands at a standstill 13.5-million. Christianity can boast about 1.3-billion, and Islam around 1-billion. But then, the world grew in human population numbers from two billion in 1930 to the current 7.1-billion for the year 2013.