564 
Agricultural Statistics. 
sissippi, this city being found to lie in the line of its calcu- 
lated progress. In some forty hours after receipt of the 
intelligence, arrived the formidable visitation which the electric 
wires had predicted, finding every sail close-reefed of the innu- 
merable river-craft always assembled there, every topmast ready 
struck, and all made safe and snug to meet the blow. Tliousands 
of pounds' worth of valuable property was thus saved by the 
timely aid of a science imperfect as yet, but, so far as known, 
the pure offspring of statistical observation. 
Everything throughout creation is governed by ' law:' but over 
most of the tracts that come within the active experience of 
mankind, the governing hand lies so secret and remote that until 
very large numerical masses are brought under the eye at once, 
the controlling power is not detected. To an appreciating 
mind there is something attractively beautiful in the delicacy 
with which laws of unswerving regularity and resistless force 
are withdrawn from view, masked behind an apparently inex- 
haustible variety, an independence and spontaneity of action, and. 
a playfulness of ' accident,' seemingly without control or bounds. 
It is impossible too much to admire this indulgent feature 
of creative and administrative power, which permits thus its 
graciousness to be lost to general sight in the success of the 
very illusion employed, 'i he whole vocabulary of those who 
talk of ' chance' and ' luck' attests the matchless lightness and elas- 
ticity of gait which disguise the majestic onward tread and move- 
ment of natural law. Statistics are the touchstone under which 
the illusion at once vanishes. Like some potent chemical test 
it ' precipitates ' at once, and exposes to view, the latent law so 
skilfully held in solution. Gathering its facts together and em- 
ploying them in masses, dealing with Nature wholesale and in the 
gross, meeting her upon a scale of magnitude, I'ar indeed behind 
her own, yet in the right patli of approach, this science forces 
out results that never would have disclosed themselves in detail. 
Figures are at once its facts, its arguments, and its conclusions : 
and the value of this will be felt when it is remembered that, 
as a general rule, the degree of certainty in any science is pro- 
portioned to the extent to wldch it admits the application of numbers. 
All experience shows the truth of this, not more in scientific 
researches than in the most ordinary business of life. Their 
advantage, as the simplest means of expression, is indeed so 
obvious, that no practical man ever dreams of substituting for 
them the indefinite phrases so commonly used in arts less ad- 
vanced. No engineer contents himself with saying that steel is 
harder than iron, or iron more ductile than lead, when he can 
express the hardness of the one or the ductility of the other, in 
numbers, though merely approximate. 
"Had statistics," says one of the most able writers on the 
