NATURE OF STATISTICAL KNOWLEDGE 77 



aspect from which he could view the whole or a 

 large part of nature. The scientific genius can 

 *stay the moment fleeting'; he can say to the 

 object of his choice, *Ah, linger still, thou art 

 so fair ' ; he can fix and keep the star in the focus 

 of his telescope, or protect the delicate fiber and 

 nerve of a decaying organism from succumbing to 

 the rapid disintegration of organic change. The 

 practical man cannot do this ; he is always and 

 everywhere met by the crowd of facts, by the 

 relentlessly hurrying stream of events. What 

 he requires is grasp of numbers, leaving to the 

 professional man the knowledge of detail. Thus 

 has arisen the science of large numbers or 

 statistics, and the many methods of which it is 

 possessed." 



Further on the same author says of the origin 

 of the science of probability {loc. cit., pp. 567-568) : 



"The necessity of having recourse to elaborate 

 countings, to registrations of births, deaths, and 

 marriages, to lists of exports and imports, to 

 records of consumption and production of food- 

 stuffs and many other items, forced upon those 

 who were intrusted with the gathering and using 

 of these data the observation that all such knowl- 

 edge is incomplete and inaccurate. Owing to the 

 variability, within certain limits, of recurring 

 events and the errors of counting and registration, 

 we have to content ourselves always with ap- 

 proximation instead of certainty. Error bulks 



