RECORDS 33 



founders, for example, of the New York Academy of Sciences. 

 The ready availabiHty of, and the constant demand for, all these 

 products to meet the daily needs of the complex civilization of 

 our time affords a sufficient answer to him who would question 

 the efforts spent in attaining those products or the efforts applied 

 in subjecting new objects of study to the rigorous tests of meas- 

 urement and calculation. 



But the principles of measurement and calculation are not 

 limited in their application to external objects, or to the proper- 

 ties of what we are sometimes pleased to call " gross matter." 

 They apply equally aptly in many ways to man himself, and it 

 is clear that with advancing civilization we may confidently ex- 

 pect such application to be greatly extended. While we have 

 not yet attained formulas which will comprehend the vagaries of 

 the individual, we have many formulas which will accurately ex- 

 press the resultant of those vagaries as manifested in racial types. 

 A life insurance company, for example, may not assert at the be- 

 ginning of a year that any individual of ten thousand men of the 

 same class will die within the year, but it may assert with prac- 

 tical certainty that a definite number of this class will die within 

 the year. Such " facts and figures " are trite enough, of course, 

 but what we commonly fail to see and appreciate is the solid 

 basis on which they rest, and how greatly it would be to our 

 advantage to extend the same sort of reasoning that has built 

 up great systems of fire and life insurance into other departments 

 of human affairs. Most people, I fear we must infer, are like 

 Thomas Carlyle, still scoffers at statistics, and few, even of the 

 educated, have any adequate conception of the order which the 

 principles of probability will bring out of the apparent disorder 

 of statistical data. 



Of the larger objects of the universe to which measurement 

 and calculation have been applied with success, the earth easily 

 surpasses all others in interest and importance. So great has 

 been this success that one may assert that we know more of the 

 earth than we do of any other body to which science has given 

 attention. Its size, its shape, the amount and arrangement of 

 its mass, its magnetic properties, its speeds of rotation and trans- 



