  In 1966, Shanks and Schmid investigated the asymptotic behavior of the number
of positive integers less than or equal to x which are represented by the
quadratic form X^2+nY^2. Based on some numerical computations, they observed
that the constant occurring in the main term appears to be the largest for n=2.
In this paper, we prove that in fact this constant is unbounded as n runs
through positive integers with a fixed number of prime divisors.
