president's address. SECTION Gi. 509- 



(iii.) Causa formalis, the cliaiacter of the State and its foiTQ of 



Government, 

 (iv.) Causa efficiens, the ruling powers, officials, and their 



auxiliaries and resources. 



This Ai'istotelian view naturally developed in breadth as it passed 

 to matters relating to affairs b&yond the bounds of a single St ate — that 

 is, as it became statistic in its larger sense. And it was in this that 

 Anton Friedrich Biisching differed from Aclienwall, forasmuch as he 

 sought to compare the chief phenomena of political life as they were 

 reflected m the statistical data of indi^^dual States, while Achenwall 

 merely described the indi\adual States themselves. It was between 

 IToi and 1792 — viz., the year before his death — that the ten parts of 

 Busching's " Neue Erdbeschreibung " appeared, a work Avhich by 1807 

 had been completed by Sprengel and others. " Das Magazin fiir His- 

 tcriographie and Geographie," a journal which contained a larg© 

 number of statistical figiu'es from various lands, wqs issued also by 

 Biisching between 1767 and 1793. It was these comparative works, 

 demanding as they did the close scrutiny of details from different 

 countries, that led to a marked advance of critical methods in 

 sttitistics. 



3. The Human Being as the Basic Unit. — Modern statistics differ 

 fiom ancient largely in its recognition of the human unit as the basic 

 element. In a democratic country this idea — y\z., that the human unit 

 is the element which, indeed, gives significance to all related facts — 

 arises naturally and inevitably, though such an idea was by no means 

 characteristic of the early statistical conceptions. The growth was 

 gradual. Continuous and systematic registrations of the births, mar- 

 riages, and deaths were, however, early made^ — viz., first in Augsburg 

 in 1501, and then soon afterwards in several other German cities. In 

 London, baptismal records date back as far as 1550, and, because of 

 the plag-ue, sj'-stematic records of death, known as bills of mortality, 

 from 1532. Totals were published intermittently till about 1603, and 

 at weekly intervals from that year onwai'ds. Women were employed 

 to inspect the dead, and to register the death, with the probable age 

 and cause of death. The bills were issued in manuscript till 1625, but 

 thereafter in print. Parishes were di,stin,guished in 1625, sexes and 

 causes in 1629, and ages in 1728.* One of the most notable contribu- 

 tions to the discussion of human life as of primaiy concern to the 

 statistician is the treatise of Captain John Graunt, entitled "Natural 

 and Political Observations on Bills of Mortality, Trade, Growth, Air, 

 Diseases, ifec, of the City of London." This work was presented in 

 1662 to the Royal Society, then founded only two years. Graunt 

 leached the conclusions that the sexes are approximately equal in 

 numbers ; that war and pestilence exercise no appreciable effect 

 thereon ; that for eveiy 13 girls bom 14 boys are born, which, it may 

 be mentioned, is slightly higher than the present Commonwealth 

 ratio; that the ratio of births to deaths is constant; and that the 

 elimination by death of 100 persons is at the rate of 36 in the first 6 

 years of life, 24 in the decade following, and then in the successive 

 decades, 15, 9, 6, 4, 3, 2, and 1. Finally, he showed that the number 

 of living persons could be calculated from such data. This may be 



* See Ogle, .Journ. Roy. Stat. Soc, Vol. 55, p. 437. 



