Theories of population from Raleigh to Arthur Young : lectures delivered in the Galtonian laboratory, University of London, under the Newmarch foundation, February 11 to March 18, 1929, with two additional lectures and with references to authorities, / by James Bonar.

  • Bonar, James, 1852-1941.
Date:
1931
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Theories of population from Raleigh to Arthur Young : lectures delivered in the Galtonian laboratory, University of London, under the Newmarch foundation, February 11 to March 18, 1929, with two additional lectures and with references to authorities, / by James Bonar. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    by their large figures as we are by our small ones. These questions are not on our programme; and, as to the competing senses of the word Probability,2 here at least, being on the common highway of Statistical inquiry itself, we may surely venture to use Probability in the sense of statistical frequency. I dare not enter farther on questions of principle in this temple of accurate statistics. Statistics are a Two-headed Janus, with one face turned to the Pligher Mathematics, the other to the humbler Economics.3 We are not renouncing the one because we follow the other. Though back to back, they are, for presentation of the complete result, inseparable. We were reminded the other day4 that the great Faraday preferred to state his physical investigations in non-mathematical lan¬ guage, leaving Clerk Maxwell to make sure that they were in strict harmony with mathematical cal¬ culation. In our own modest range of study, William JVewmarch,5 to whose name and fame these lectures are due, enables me to plead his example when I take up a statistical subject on its less severe side. He was perhaps best known to the world as the continuer of Thomas Tooke’s History of Prices and of the State of the Circulation during the years 1793 to 1856, in 6 vols., published 1838 to 1857. Newmarch contributed to the last two volumes substantially all except the passages dealing with Corn. This meant that he dealt with “the general course of trade, the progress of railway construction, the history of free trade from 1820 to 1856, the commercial and H