ON THE STATISTICAL VIEW OF NATURE. 579 



wliicli began with the consideration of play has risen 

 to the most important ol)jects of human knowledge." 



In 1823, soon after the appearance of the works of 

 Laplace and other French writers, this application of 

 the theory of probabilities was taken up by Adolphe 

 Quetelet, who collected his researches in his cele- 

 brated work, ' Sur I'Homme et le I)c\eloppement de ses 

 Facultes, ou Essai de Physique sociale.' ^ Quetelet 



20. 

 Quetelet. 



^ In addition to this work, which 

 was published at Brussels in 1836 

 in two small volumes, and which 

 Quetelet (1796-1874) describes as 

 a ' resume de tous mes travaux 

 anterieurs sur la stalistique,' 

 he published, besides a great 

 number of memoirs, a series 

 of ' Lettres sur la Th(5orie des 

 Probabilites' (begun in 1837, pub. 

 1845, Eng. trans, by O. G. Downes, 

 1849), and as a continuation of 

 the former work in 1848, ' Du 

 Systome social et des Lois qui le 

 regissent.' Less known than those 

 of Quetelet, but about the same 

 time, and independently, there ap- 

 peared in France the writings of 

 A. M. Guerry, beginning with the 

 publication in 1829 — in collabora- 

 tion with A. Balbi — of ' Statisticjue 

 comparde, et I'dtat de I'instruc- 

 tion et du nombre des crimes,' 

 and in 1833, 'Essai sur la sta- 

 tistique morale de la France.' 

 The term "'moral statistics" ap- 

 pears here for the first time. 

 Quetelet was the inventor of the 

 term " Social Physics." Guerry 

 employed graphical methods, and 

 published in 1864 ' Statistiijue 

 morale de I'Angleterre comparde 

 avec la statistique morale de la 

 France.' M. Block ('Statistique,' 

 p. 43) attributes to Guerry and 

 Charles Dujiin the general intro- 

 duction of the gi-aphical method 

 in statistics ; geometrical represent- 

 ations having been adopted at the 



end of the eighteenth century by 

 Wm. Playfair in England, and, 

 before him, bj' Crome, professor 

 at Giessen, in 1782, and tabular 

 synoptical statements going back 

 to the Danish writer J. P. 

 Anchersen, in his ' Descrijitio 

 Statuum Cultiorum in Tabulis ' 

 (Cojjenhagen and Leipzig, 1741) ; 

 see V. John, ' Geschichte der 

 Statistik,' p. 88. Referring to 

 Guen-y, V. John (p. 367) says: 

 " (,!uetelet is incontestably to be 

 regarded as the founder of the 

 new science (viz., moral statistics), 

 for the rival works of the 

 French lawyer Guerry ajipeared 

 only partly before (,>uetelet's, and 

 are excelled by the latter in the 

 use made of the material. In- 

 dependently of this formal dif- 

 ference, the two authors have 

 quite different conceptions of the 

 new science. (Juerry regards its 

 object as consisting mainly in col- 

 lecting data in order to gain an 

 opinion of the moral status of a 

 country. Thus he looked upon 

 moral statistics as auxiliary to the 

 history of civilisation. <i>uetelet 

 went beyond this, inasmuch as he 

 was the first to inquire into the 

 cause of the moral level of a 

 population, and in as much as in 

 his criminal statistics of Belgium, 

 1833, he had already given ex- 

 pression to the fundamentvl idea, 

 ' Society bears the germs of crime 

 in itself.' "' 



