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only a commercial treaty, or a new discovery, or a political revolution, events which make certain
luxuries and powers, which had before been reserved for the privileged ones of fortune or intellect,
accessible to those possessing thinner purses or fewer abilities, to convert it into actual energy. This
potential energy, then, is of great importance, and it would be well to bear its fluctuations in mind.
And yet ordinary statistics seem to pay no attention to this force. The labour of making an
approximate esimate of it would seem ridiculous, although it might be done by many indirect methods
and might at times be of advantage to Statistics. In this respect, archaeology is superior in the
information which it gives us about buried societies; for although it may teach us less about their
activities in point of detail and precision, it pictures their aspirations more faithfully. A Pompeiian
fresco reveals the psychological condition of a provincial town under the Roman Empire much more
clearly than all the statistical volumes of one of the principal places of a French department can tell
us about the actual wishes of its inhabitants.
Let me add that Statistics is of such recent origin that it has not yet shot out all its branches,
whereas its older collaborator has ramified in all directions. There is an archaeology of language,
comparative philology, which draws up separate monographs for us of the life of every root from its
accidental origin in the mouth of some ancient speaker through its endless reproductions and
multiplications by means of the remarkable uniformity of innumerable generations of men. There is in
archaeology of religion, comparative mythology, which deals separately with every myth and with its
endless imitative editions, just as philology treats every word. There is an archaeology of law, of
politics, of ethnology, and, finally, of art and industry. They likewise devote a separate treatise to
every legal idea or fiction, to every custom or institution, to every type or creation of art, to every
industrial process, and, in addition, to the power of reproduction by example which is peculiar to
each of these things. And we have a corresponding number of distinct and flourishing sciences. But,
hitherto, in the matter of truly and exclusively sociological statistics, we have had to be content with
statistics of commerce and industry, and with judicial statistics, not to speak of certain hybrid
statistics which straddle both the physiological and the social worlds, statistics of population, of
births, marriages, deaths, medical statistics, etc. In tables of election figures we have merely the germ
of political statistics. As to religious statistics, which should give us a graphic representation of the
relative annual spread of different sects and of the thermometric variations, so to speak, in the faith of
their adherents; as to linguistic statistics, which should figure for us not only upon the comparative
expansion of different idioms, but upon the vogue or decline, in each one of them, of every vocable,
of every form of speech, I fear that, if I should say anything more about these hypothetical sciences, I
might bring a smile to the lips of my readers. . . .
If this point of view is correct, if it is really the fittest from which to elucidate social events on
their regular, numerable, and measurable sides, it follows that Statistics should adopt it, not partially
and unconsciously, but knowingly and unreservedly, and thus, like archaeology, be spared many
fruitless investigations and tribulations. I will enumerate the principal consequences that would result
from this. In the first place, sociological Statistics, having acquired a touchstone for the knowledge of
what did and what did not belong to it, and having become convinced that the immense field of human
imitation, and only that field, was its exclusive possession, would leave to naturalists the care of
tabulating statistics so purely anthropological in their results as, for example, the statistics of
exemption from military service in the different departments of France, or the task of constructing
tables of mortality (I do not include tables of birth rates, for, in this case, example is a powerful
factor in restraining or stimulating racial fecundity). This is pure biology, just as much as the use of
Mr. Marey’s graphical method, or as the observation of disease through the myograph and