Report on Philology, etc. 



189 



affairs in which individuals seem least controlled by law 

 and most free to act their own caprice, yet in the commu- 

 nity, as a whole, there exists a proportion as exact as if the 

 most inexorable laws compelled each one to the perform- 

 ance of every action, and this relation between every kind 

 of action and the number of persons who will engage in it 

 may be expressed in curves for which a mathematical 

 formula can be obtained, in which the ordinates shall repre- 

 sent the number of persons of each class, and the abscissae 

 the degree or kind of action performed. I know of no 

 discovery of science more wonderful than this, which traces 

 the operations of law in matters usually thought to be most 

 utterly lawless. An interesting account of these investi- 

 gations of Quetelet on the Science of Man is given in the 

 May number of the Popular Science Monthly; and it is 

 there remarked that though statistics of purely mental 

 actions have not yet been compiled, there can be little 

 doubt that the same laws will ultimately be found applica- 

 ble to them also. Indeed, without the aid of statistical 

 tables, we may see something of this in the well known 

 fact that every generation produces about the same num- 

 ber of men in each general department of industry, show- 

 ing, pro tanto, an average uniformity in the proportional 

 number of men in the community of all different intel- 

 lectual and industrial proclivities. 



Of the classification of races of men, or ethnology pro- 

 per, there is but little that I need to say, for, so far as I 

 have been able to learn, no final and complete classifica- 

 tion has yet been attained, nor am I aware of any special 

 works on this subject very recently issued. 



It will be seen that the range of topics belonging to this 

 class of philology, ethnology and anthropology is a wide 

 one, and in the highest degree interesting. 4 'Know thy- 

 self" is a maxim which became almost the shibboleth of a 

 system of philosophy, and which is certainly the only gen- 

 uine foundation of all philosophy. Subjective knowledge 



