TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION F. 1165 
was a striking contrast to the interest taken in arboriculture and sylviculture in 
France, Prussia, Switzerland, and Russia. Colleges there were provided with a 
complete staff of accomplished professors, who trained youths of good birth to 
become State foresters. He did not see any immediate prospect of the establish- 
ment of a School of Forestry ; attention, however, had been called to the matter 
in Parliament; and such a school must be established sooner or later. In Edinburgh 
a movement had been set afoot by the Marquis of Lothian and other gentlemen for 
raising 10,0007. for the exhibition of many valuable objects entrusted to them, and 
the establishment of a lectureship or professorship of forestry. The 10,0002., how- 
eyer, was slow in coming in,! 
2. What is Capital? By W. Westcarrn. 
The author alluded to the wide divergencies of view upon this question amongst 
Jeading economists. On behalf of commerce and banking he challenged the correct- 
ness of these views. Capital was usually defined by economists as consisting of 
things used in production, and as beiny only that part of wealth which is applied to 
produce further wealth. The same thing may be capital and not capital, according 
to the hands itis in. Thus, a manufacturer deals with capital, but not a shop- 
keeper, the former being a producer, but the latter only a distributor. Mr. West- 
garth holds that this is only a conventional capital created in the minds of 
economists, and haying no existence elsewhere. No doubt much confusion arose 
from the free and loose use, both in and out of business, of the term capital. Thus 
we had fixed capital, liability capital, and so on; but, holding the word to mean 
now universally the ready fund of business life, we ought, for clearness’ sake, 
to avoid, in economic science, to give the term capital to anything else but this 
fund. No doubt the term capital had, originally and derivatively, the meaning 
expressed by ‘fixed capital,’ and the business fund might be viewed as an interloper 
in appropriating the name. But none the less we must accept facts. The inter- 
loper cannot now be dislodged, and we must not continue to call different things by 
one and the same name, What, then, is thiscapital fund? It is substantially the 
stocks of trading, called into existence, and maintained in existence, by the wants 
of trading or exchange. Every trader must have stock of his particular vocation, 
and this stock collectively is the society's capital. The merchandise and money and 
rolling-stock of a country’s commerce constitute its capital fund. Money is only a 
particular form of merchandise. his capital fund increases or diminishes accord- 
ing to the circumstances of the trading, as requiring more or less stock. On the 
one hand is the constant tendency to economise capital so as to save the cost 
of holding it ; on the other hand capital is ever increased by the constant effort to 
increase profit through extending the scale of business, and thus reducing relatively 
the expenses. We have thus the elements of the limitation or law of capital. 
For instance, the Suez Canal is cut in order, by the reduced time, to economise 
capital in shipping and cargo. But these economies themselves so increase the 
trading, that still more ships and cargoes than before are the result. The causes 
which economise or reduce capital are exceeded in effect by the causes which 
increase it; and thus, while increased profit is the object, increased capital is the 
concurrent result. We have here the elements of a ‘law of capital.’ 
3. On Methods of ascertaining Variations in the Rates of Birth, Death, and 
Marriage. By ¥. Y. Encewortn. 
This paper is designed as a study in that branch of statistics which may be 
described as the method of eliminating chance by means of the mathematical 
theory of errors, In illustration of the general principle, the following example is 
discussed :—Suppose that the mean age at death of a hundred (or a thousand) 
total abstainers, taken from the general population above a certain age, is greater 
by a year or so than that of the general population, what presumption is there that 
1 Printed in Forestry, November 1885. 
