of Edinburgh, Session 1880-81. 
813 
posing society generalise the results of the daily labours of the 
Registrar of births, deaths, and marriages, with those of the 
periodic census, and there again with anthropological and educational 
statistics, while the three tables immediately following offer a 
solution of two long outstanding and highly important problems, — 
first, that of the classification of occupations;* and second, that 
of the nature of productive and unproductive labour. 
Lastly, the tables of Production, Partition, and Use aim respec- 
tively at including the facts of the usual divisions of political 
economy — the production, distribution, and consumption of wealth ; 
while the last — those of Result — cover, as before stated, a large but 
incomplete and unsystematised body of knowledge accumulated by 
biologists, physicians, educationists, and philanthropists, and re- 
lating to the reaction of the environment upon the organisms 
composing the society. 
§ 25. If, therefore, it has been admitted that the series of tables are 
placed in order and organised into a whole, it becomes evident that 
the subjects just enumerated, viz., the facts of political geography, 
of pnysical, geological, botanical, and zoological economics, of 
technology and the fine arts, of anthropology, of demography, and 
of political economy have similarly been placed in order and 
organised into a whole. This whole body of facts treated 
statistically and historically, and the generalisations obtained 
from them, together with an account of intersocial relations, 
would constitute a complete account of the society, or group of 
societies. 
§ 26. While it is evident that in our ascending progress from 
the preliminary sciences no shock has been felt, and no difficulty 
found, in the successive assimilation of the facts of political 
geography, physical and biological economics, technology and 
demography, a vast hiatus becomes evident on our approach to 
political economy. For here we find not a definite record of 
observed phenomena aiming at exhaustiveness, together with the 
generalisations obtained therefrom, but a multitude of contending 
* See the very interesting alphabetic list of occupations in the London 
Directory, and the discussions as to classification in the Report of the United 
States Census, 1870, and Report of Census of Scotland, 1871, where detailed 
classifications are also given. 
