DEFINITION OF SOME MODERN SCIENCES. 103 



belongs to the historical or comparative method of study. The Ger- 

 man historian, Schlosser, said that history is statistics ever advancing, 

 and statistics is stationary history. Looking beneath the words of 

 Schlosser, one must conclude that he meant that the constant accumu- 

 lation of statistical data from period to period or from epoch to epoch 

 — that is, statistics ever in motion — creates history, history being made 

 up of the ever-advancing events of life which are shown through statis- 

 tical methods, but that statistics of one epoch constitutes the perma- 

 nent history thereof. 



So the statistician, in the truest historical and comparative sense, 

 writes history, but he writes it in the most crystallized form which can 

 be adopted. He uses symbols, but with them he unlocks the facts of 

 his own period so that they may be made plain to all students coming 

 after him. He tells the story of our present state in such a way that 

 when the age we live in becomes the past that story shall be found to 

 exist in true and just proportions. The word 'statistics/ illustrating 

 fixed and settled conditions, indicates the soundness of the German 

 writer's thought and the true spirit in which the statistician should 

 work. 



The use of the statistical method in a scientific way is practically 

 modern. In ancient times there were counts of the people, but no 

 scientific use of the results that would warrant the application of the 

 name statistics. These ' counts' were largely to ascertain military 

 strength and divisions of geographical sections. David, you will re- 

 member, undertook to number the people. This effort on his part 

 caused him a great deal of difficulty, and, so far as the history of the 

 world is concerned, every man since David's time who has undertaken 

 to number the people has met more or less opposition and had more or 

 less trouble. All through history we read of counts or, as we say 

 now, enumerations, but they were crude in the extreme and cannot be 

 considered as statistical efforts. 



Under our modern systems there are three kinds of statistics — 

 I mean by 'kinds' methods which involve different systems to secure 

 results. These are, first, statistics secured by the continuous record 

 of official acts, as, for instance, the returns from the custom houses; 

 those returns relating to imports and exports, immigration and other 

 affairs are the results of a continuous record of events and are reported 

 to a central office, tabulated and classified. School statistics, the re- 

 turns of births, deaths and marriages — these come under this classi- 

 fication. They belong more clearly to the domain of bookkeeping, 

 although statistical genius is essential in the classification and analy- 

 sis of the entries. 



The second class of statistics are those secured by actual enumera- 

 tion, like census statistics, where aggregates are essential to the in- 



