562 
Agricultural Statistics. 
It is a familiar doctrine of science, that all knowledge is 
founded on ' induction ;' that is to say, in more popular phrase, 
if you want to arrive at principles you must begin by noting 
facts. A general law upon any subject, be it what it may, is 
nothing more than the united testimony, the voice of a multitude 
of individual instances. It is only by the accurate collection and 
collation of these facts or instances that any reliable knowledge 
can be arrived at. Take, as an example, the case of the duration 
of human life : what can be more uncertain in the individual ? 
One lives to a hundred, another dies in infancy ; yet by a sort 
of rough observation and comparison of instances we easily 
arrive at the idea of an average duration, to which each man 
looks as to a known general law, and upon which he entirely and 
practically relies, though he sees it almost every day apparently 
contradicted in the individual cases by which he is surrounded, 
or which come within his knowledge. But this, confidently as 
we see it acted upon, is merely the first step, furnishing no 
definite conclusion and of no practical use. But let the inductive 
process be carried further; let the observation be carefully ex- 
tended over a large area of population for a number of years, by 
accurately compiled tables of mortality ; and that which seemed 
at first to be the very emblem of uncertainty, and in the second 
stage amounted only to an indefinite average, is gradually found 
to furnish conclusions, before unsuspected, but susceptible of the 
most important practical application. 
Thus, in the recent Report of the Registrar General on the 
entire population of England, it is shown that a ' law ' obtains 
by which it may be assumed with certainty that one person out 
of every forty-five living at the commencement of any year will 
die within that year.* A fact of this kind once established be- 
comes a solid basis for calculations of the most valuable kind; 
amongst others those applicable to life insurance, whereby an 
uncertainty, irremediable at first sight, may be guarded against, 
in all that is of chief moment and anxiety to human feelings, by 
purchasing a fixed interest in a sum representing the assumed 
savings of a life of ordinary duration, by an annual deposit regu- 
lated in accordance with the known average, and reduced by it 
to the lowest point compatible with safety. 
By the accumulation of individual facts, equally in other 
branches of knowledge, as in the instance given, a structure is 
found gradually to arise, endued with a firmness, stability, 
and symmetry of parts no more to have been anticipated from 
the nature of the original materials, than the architectural effect 
* The departure from this law is so trifling, that in the fourteen years ending, 
■with 1851 there were only two years in which the mortality varied as far as to one 
in 40, against which may he put three years in which it was only one in 48. 
