STATISTICS. Etymologically. the science of States. The word seems to have been introduced into England about the beginning of the nine teenth century. It came into use in Germany about half a century earlier, and was there ap plied to lectures or books upon descriptive politi cal science, of which the Statesman's Year Book and the Alm,anach de Gotha. are typical modern representatives. If either of these annual publi cations be imagined stripped of the numerical statements so frequent in them, a very fair notion is left of Achenwall's Outlines of Modern Politi cal Science ("Abriss der neuesten Staatswissen schaft," etc., 1749), which opens with the state ment: "The notion of statistics so called, that is, the political science of the several kingdoms, is very differently understood, and among the many books on the subject it is not easy to find any one that agrees with the rest in the number and the arrangement of its parts," a complaint which might be made to-day with almost equal correct ness. The title Statistics thus adopted by Ach enw•aII established itself as the prevailing name for a sort of descriptive political science, which had existed long before as the Elzevir Republics and the writings of Conring illustrate, and which maintained itself at the universities and before the public in Germany until into the nineteenth century.
Meantime in England a different line of work had begun about the middle of the seven teenth century, after the recurrent and disastrous visitations of the plague had roused interest enough in the mortality it did so much to swell to cause weekly reports of the burials and later of the christenings in London to be made and published. The keen interest in the meth ods of observation and measurement which culminated in and were reinforced by the Royal Society, chartered in 1662, induced Captain John Graunt to apply methods of observation, induc tion, and measurement to the births and deaths of London. He presented to the Royal Society in 1662 his "Observations on the Bills of Mortal ity," the foundation of statistics as that word is now understood. But at that time the new study
was baptized by his friend and collaborator, Sir William Petty, 'Political Arithmetic.' Interest in this line of work grew and spread gradually to the Continent, where Achenwall s contemporary Stissmileh in 1741 hailed Graunt as a scientific Columbus who had discovered a new continent and confessed himself Graunt's disciple, but showed no knowledge of Achenwall's work and made no use of the name statistics. Gradually the word 'statistics spread to Great Britain, where, in 1798, Sir John Sinclair published his Statistical Account of Scotland. The word was taken up by Malthus in editions of his Principle of Population• after the first, and in such con nection as to indicate that he borrowed it from Sinclair. Malthus's subject-matter was in the line of previous writers on political arithmetic, and his adoption of the term statistics may have been instrumental in leading to its gradual displacement of the lengthier phrase in English writing. Meantime the study of political arith metic, born in England, extended to the Conti nent, gradually displacing the older statistics of Achenwall, sometimes called 'university statis tics,' from its prevalence as a subject of univer sity lectures, and, to add insult to injury, usurped its name. Perhaps the most striking difference between the two notions of statistics, the older and the newer, is that the former is purely de scriptive and takes no account of the underlying notion of modern science, the notion of causation, while the latter subordinates description to ex planation, or an attempt at explanation. At the same time it would be inconsistent with present usage to limit the word statistics any further than to say that it refers to the results obtained in any field of reality by methods of counting and that these methods are mainly employed in the study of societies politically organized into States.