476 Proceedings of the Royal Society 
coverer, and his success in this department is to be attributed to 
the clearness with which he saw that statistics occupy the same 
place in the development of the social and political sciences that 
observational data do in the development of such sciences as astro- 
nomy and meteorology; to the patient industry with which, through 
long years, he gathered together his facts ; and to the mathematical 
skill he brought to bear on their discussion. He was truly, as 
stated by the Academy of Berlin in their congratulatory letter on 
the occasion of the centenary of the Belgium Academy, “ the 
founder of a new science, which proceeds from the firm basis of 
observation and calculation, to discover and unfold those im- 
mutable laws which govern the phenomena, apparently the most 
accidental, of the life of man, down even to his most trivial actions.” 
9. Biographical Notice of George Berry. 
By George Barclay, Esq. 
Mr George Berry was born in Edinburgh (where his father, of 
a Quaker family in Somersetshire, had settled as a merchant), on 
the 12th of January 1795. Bred to business himself, partly at 
home and partly in France, Mr Berry succeeded his father in Edin- 
burgh, but about 1834 removed to Leith, whence, after a successful 
mercantile career of twenty years, he retired, and died at Portobello 
on the 1st of May last. 
While in Leith Mr Berry took an active part in public affairs ; 
he was one of the founders of the Chamber of Commerce, and 
having early become an enthusiastic “Free trader,” he continued, 
during the years of struggle which preceded the national adoption 
of that policy, perhaps the most prominent representative of free 
trade doctrines in Leith. 
But though greatly occupied with business, Mr Berry was through 
all his life also somewhat of a student. A great reader, and gifted 
with a retentive memory, he was well versed in English literature 
and in science. He had been a pretty good chemist of his own day, 
but specially a devoted and accomplished mineralogist and geologist 
of the school of Jameson. In pursuit of these studies he spent for 
years as a young man his spare hours at home, and his holidays in 
