52 
upon by the methods of the higher analysis and the result can be reduced 
to rational laws for the control of trade. 
When the diversified interests of our country have been thus subjected 
for a period of years to statistical investigation and these results again 
have been formulated into equations of condition which in turn may be 
operated upon by the prolific methods of the mathematician; when finally 
the laws thus deduced have been published, read and understood, we may 
hope that commerce may be something besides a shrewd guess and that 
its shores will not be strewed with the wrecks of the hopes of 95 per cent. 
of those who embark upon its uncertain tides. 
In 1815, Elkanah Watson, the well-known promoter of the Erie Canal, 
made his famous prophecy concerning the rapidity of the settlement of the 
United States. Some will remember how marvelously accurate this 
prophecy was fulfilled up to the sixth decade. But, beginning with the 
census for 1870, a wide divergence set in. At first the large deficiency in 
the observed population of 1870 was naturally attributed to the influence 
of the civil war. The mathematicians, however, soon began to analyze 
the returns and they discovered that the hayvoe and distress of our great 
conflict was quite inadequate to account for the change in rate of in- 
crease. As a result of these purely mathematical investigations, our 
sociologists began to search for the new conditions which were so pro- 
foundly affecting American life. They found them in the increase of 
luxury, in the more expensive habits of living then introduced, which 
tended to check the size of American families. So, analysis applied to 
sociological questions can not report on more forces than have been en- 
trusted to it, but it may call attention to the fact that new and unknown 
causes have entered into problems under discussion and show where they 
first made their appearance. Thus it may lead the way to discoveries of 
vast moment in the sum total of human knowledge. 
To what is our analysis leading us? Who can tell? It is certainly 
gradually arming us with powers comparable to those of the fabled Mar- 
tians of recent Cosmopolitan fame. 
saraday was probably an abler man than Maxwell. The former de- 
veloped many ideas which would not have occurred to the latter, but he 
was no mathematician. Maxwell took up the results furnished by his pre- 
decessor and worked out by the calculus the electro-magnetic theory of 
light, deducing many curious things which could never have occurred to 
Faraday. 
