820 REPORT— 1900. 



Section F.— ECONOMIC > SCIENCE AND STATISTICS. 



President of the Section' — Major P. G. Ceaigie, V.P.S.S. 



THURSDA Y, SEPTEMBER G. 

 The President delivered the following Address : — 



The ' Advancement of Science' is the motive wherewith the British Association 

 brin"-s annually together, In autumnal conclave, a gathering of those who desire 

 to tell and those who wish to hear something of the most recent developments of 

 scientific labour. Entrusted for the session with the high honour of presiding 

 over a Section where the chair has from time to time been occupied by a long 

 roll of distinguished men. whose qualifications for the task necessarily far outstrip 

 any I could pretend to claim, I may yet follow the example set by such authorities 

 in maintaining on your behalf, and on my own, that the right production, the 

 proper treatment, and the wise grouping oif garnered facts concerning man aud 

 his relations to the State as a member of society constitute a study second in 

 importance to no other form of research. Moreover, such expert discussion of 

 statistical methods and statistical results as ought to be possible in this Section 

 should, I thiuk, prove a factor of no small moment in its bearing on the true 

 advancement of Science in its broadest sense, whether physical, economic, or 

 political. 



Without the claim to speak to you on the lines which could be appropriately 

 adopted by some former Presidents, who have held positions of eminence, won 

 either in the highest fields of politics or earned by patient work in the cloistered 

 retreats of academic study, I come here rather to represent those who form, as it 

 were, the hewers of wood and drawers of water for the economic controversialists 

 of the day. As such we are concerned in the dally outturn of raw statistical 

 material, and we are naturally jealous as to the use to be made of our figures by 

 those who employ them in the process of scientific deduction, in the business of 

 practical administration, or in the eflPorts of philosophic teaching. 



"Whatever be the precise meaning we are willing to accord to the term of 

 'statistics' — and both the primary interpretation and the proper scope of the 

 expression have been dlfierently construed — I believe you will agree with me in 

 echoing the opinion expressed, I think, by a very distinguished past President 

 of this Assoclntion, that nearly all the grandest discoveries in science have been 

 but the rewards of accurate measurement and patient long-continued labour in the 

 sifting of numerical results. 



Not only thus may we claim for what is sometimes looked upon as the merely 

 mechanical part of statistical work a directly educational eflect on the honest 

 workers themselves, in the training and discipline of mind which are required for 

 the handling and weighing, the balancing and comparing of numerically arranged 

 facts ; we may go further and assert that every science in its turn has occasion to 



