-1859] WRITINGS OF JOSEPH HENRY. 7 



large country the number of crimes, as well as each kind of 

 crime, can be foretold for every coming year with the same 

 certainty as the number of births and deaths. Of every 

 hundred persons accused before the supreme tribunal in 

 France, sixty-one are condemned; in England, seventy -one; 

 the variation on an average from these numbers hardly 

 amounting to a hundredth part of the whole. Not only the 

 number of suicides in general for several years to come can 

 be foretold with confidence, but also the relative proportion 

 by firearms and by hanging. 



The astonishing facts of this class lead us inevitably to 

 the conclusion that all events are governed by a Supreme In- 

 telligence, who knows no change, and that under the same 

 conditions, the same results are invariably produced. If the 

 conditions however are permanently varied, a corresponding 

 change in the results will be observed ; for example, the 

 effect of the introduction of an extended system of moral 

 education, in diminishing crime, would be revealed by the 

 statistics. 



It is this regularity observable in phenomena when 

 studied in groups of large numbers, which enables us to 

 arrive at permanent laws in regard to meteorology, and 

 hence to predict with certainty the average temperature of 

 a given place for a series of decades of years, and which fur- 

 nishes the basis (in accordance with the principles of insur- 

 ance) of a knowledge of what species of plant or animal 

 may be profitably raised in a given locality. We need not 

 however in this branch of knowledge, as in that of the sta- 

 tistics of crime, be confined to the mere discovery of the ex- 

 istence and the measure of the constants of nature ; but 

 uniting the results of observations with those of experiments 

 in the laboratory and mathematical deductions from astro- 

 nomical and other data, we are enabled not only to refer 

 the periodic changes to established laws, but also to trace to 

 their source various perturbing influences which produce the 

 variations from the mean, and thus arrive at an approximate 

 explanation at least, of the meteorological phenomena which 

 are constantly presented to us. 



