906 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XX. No. 522. 



by political economists. They will need 

 all the science of the actuary, all the skill 

 of the statistician, and all their own power 

 of analysis. 



You may ask what can be done in these 

 respects. The official statistician, who, as 

 I have said, is the ally of the political eco- 

 nomists, and who recog-nizes the scope and 

 the necessity of all that is taught in ortho- 

 dox political economy, also recognizes the 

 need of the further application of economic 

 analysis in the use of the data he collects. 

 He can not study these questions except 

 from the statistical point of view. His 

 duty is to collect, classify, and publish 

 facts relating to the conditions of the 

 people. Their economic interpretation 

 must be, and largely too, the work of an- 

 other class. 



Professor Simon Newcomb, in a tentative 

 way, has made some suggestions along these 

 lines. These suggestions have been sub- 

 mitted to the Carnegie Institution of 

 Washington, with the hope that that In- 

 stitution may effectively promote not only 

 research in the exact sciences but the anal- 

 ysis of data that are now in existence. He 

 says that the nineteenth century indus- 

 triously piled up a vast mass of sociological 

 observations and data, as well as data re- 

 lating to other branches of science, and 

 that this accumulation is going on without 

 end and at great expense in every civilized 

 coiantry. This proposition we all admit. 

 The problem of working out the best re- 

 sults from these observations, however, is 

 one which is not being effectively grappled 

 with, the consequence being that what has 

 been done toward obtaining results con- 

 sists largely in piece-meal efforts of indi- 

 viduals, frequently leading to no well-estab- 

 lished conclusions. "He asserts that an- 

 other feature of the situation is the gradual 

 extension of the principles of exact science 

 into the sociological field ; that it is through 

 this extension, rather than through adding 



to the already accumulated mass of facts, 

 that progress is most to be hoped for in the 

 future. 



He therefore suggests that a body of 

 men be employed, organized into a bureau 

 of exact sciences in general, whose work 

 shall be the development of mathematical 

 methods and their application to the great 

 mass of existing observations. He under- 

 stands well, of course, the difficulty of se- 

 curing just the right men who can take up 

 in a sociological way— although his sugges- 

 tions embody many other branches — the 

 exact scientific analysis and interpretation 

 of facts in existence. 



Evidence comes from other sources. Dr. 

 Karl Pearson, of University College, Lon- 

 don, in commenting upon Doctor New- 

 comb's suggestion, states that a man of 

 mediocre ability can observe and collect 

 facts, but that it takes the exceptional man 

 of great logical power and control of meth- 

 od to draw legitimate conclusions from 

 them. He thinks that at least 50 per cent, 

 of the observations made and the data col- 

 lected are worthless, and that no man, how- 

 ever able, could deduce any result at all 

 from them; that, in the language of engi- 

 neers, we need to ' scrap ' about 50 per cent, 

 of the products of nineteenth-century sci- 

 ence ; that the scientific journals teem with 

 papers which are of no real value at all re- 

 cording observations that can not be of 

 service to any one, because they have not 

 been undertaken with a due regard to the 

 safeguards which a man takes who makes 

 observations with a view of testing a the- 

 ory of his own ; that in other cases the col- 

 lector or observer is hopelessly ignorant of 

 the conditions under which alone accurate 

 work can be done; that such a man piles 

 up observations and data because he sees 

 other men doing it, and because that is 

 siipposed to be scientific research. 



Professor Pearson feels that sociological 

 observations are of the lowest grade of 



