90 



THE RATE OF GROWTH 



[CH. 



The meaning of the word "statistics" is curiously changed. For 

 Shakespeare or for Milton a statist meant (so Dr Johnson says) 

 "a pohtician, a statesman; one skilled in government." The 

 eighteenth-century Statistical Account of Scotland was a description 

 of the State and of its people, its wealth, its. agriculture and its trade. 



Stature and weight* of man (from QuMeleVs Belgian data, 

 Essai, II, pp. 23-43; Anthropometric, p. 346) f 



This is what Sir Wilham Petty had meant in the seventeenth century 

 by his Political Arithmetic, and what Quetelet meant in the nine.teenth 

 by his Physique Sociale. But "statistics" nowadays are counts and 

 measures of all sorts of things; and statistical science arranges, 



* The figures for height and weight given in my first edition were Quetelet's 

 smoothed or adjusted values. I have gone back to his original data. 



t This "almost steady growth," from about seven years old to eleven, means 

 that the curve of growth is a nearly straight line during this period: a result 

 already found by Elderton for Glasgow children {Biometrika, x, p. 293, 1914-15), 

 by Fessard and Laufer in Paris {Nouvelles Tables de Croissance, 1935, p. 13), etc. 



