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xxv.

THE STATISTICAL CENTURy.l
•
HE present meeting takes place at an interesting
T date. We are within a few weeks of the close of
a century which is, historically speaking, the statistical
century par excellence. There were statistics, of course,
before the Nineteenth Century. People made statistical
statements and compiled statistics long before they
were called statisticians. The business of rulers could
not, in fact, have gone on at any time without statistical
knowledge, and statistical statements are to be found
accordingly in the records of Egypt, Assyria, and Ba-
bylonia thousands of years ago, just as they are to be
found in old European chronicles and histories long
before last century. But while people for a long time,
like the Frenchman in the play who talked prose, have
thus been statisticians without knowing it, it is towards
the end of the Eighteenth Century, and at the beginning
of the century now expiring, that statistics began to be
formally recognized as a distinct branch of knowledge.
From that time attention has been explicitly and in-
creasingly given by governments to the collection of
statistics. Statistical offices have been established for
births, marriages, and deaths, for statistics of foreign
trade and movements of shipping, for agricultural sta-
tistics, and for many more subjects, as well as central
offices for statistics generally. Last, but not least, with
the commencement of the century, we had the institu-
tion of the census in this country, following the ex-
1 Address at the Annual Dinner of the Manchester Statistical
Society, October 17th, 1900.
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