THE CURIOSITIES OF STATISTICS.

THE American people, like their European ancestry, may be said to have a passion for facts. They instinctively demand the basis upon which every statement rests, and all things must show their reason for being. The statistics of every art, trade, and manufacture are sought for with interest and swallowed with avidity. Sometimes we are reproached for our overweening taste for romance, and our vast consumption of books of fiction; but the demand for books of fact, the steady and enormous sale of encyclopædias, dictionaries, and popular scientific books, is something far in advance of what is common in other nations, and evinces the popular taste for the solid and the practical. No people in the world hunt so eagerly after precedents as the Americans, and it is only candid to add, that no people, when found, so systematically disregard them.

Next to a Bible and a dictionary of language, there is no book perhaps more common than a biographical dictionary. Our interest in our fellow-men is perennial; and we seek to know not only their characteristics, and the distinguishing events of their lives, but also the time of their birth into the world and their exit from it. This is a species of statistics upon which one naturally expects certainty, since no person eminent enough to be recorded at all is likely to have had the epoch of his death, at least, unremarked. Yet the seeker after exact information in the biographical dictionaries will find, if he extends his quest among various authorities, that he is afloat on a sea of uncertainties. Not only can he not find out the date of decease of navigators like Sir John Franklin and La Perouse, who sailed into the unexplored regions of the globe, and were never heard of more, save by the finding of a few traces where they perished, but the men who died at home, in the midst of friends and families, are frequently recorded as deceased at dates so discrepant that no ingenuity can reconcile them. In Haydn's Dictionary of Dates, Sir Henry Havelock is said to have died November 25th, 1857, while Maunder's Treasury of Biography gives November 21st, the London Almanac November 27th, and the Life of Havelock, by his brother-inlaw, November 24th. Here are four distinct dates of death given, by

authorities equally accredited, to a famous general, who died within twenty years. Of the death of the notorious Robespierre, guillotined in 1794, we find in Chalmers' Biographical Dictionary that he died July 10th, in Rees' Cyclopædia, July 28th, and in Alison's History of Europe, July 29th. Doubtless it is some comfort to reflect, in view of his many crimes, that the bloody tyrant of the Jacobins is really dead, irrespective of the date, about which biographers may dispute. Of the English mechanician Joseph Bramah, inventor of the Bramah lock, we learn from the English Cyclopædia that he died in 1814, and from Rose's Biographical Dictionary that he died in 1815.

Now, although a large share of the errors and discrepancies that abound in biographical dictionaries and other books of reference may be accounted for by misprints, others by reckoning old style instead of new, or vice versa, and many more by the carelessness of editors and transcribers, it is plain that all the variations cannot thus be accounted for. Nothing is more common in printing-offices than to find a figure 6 inverted serving as a 9, a 5 for a 3, or a 3 for an 8, while 8, 9, and 0 are frequently interchanged. In such cases, a lynx-eyed proof-reader may not always be present to prevent the falsification of history; and it is a fact not sufficiently recognized, that to the untiring vigilance, intelligence, and hard conscientious labors of proofreaders, the world owes a deeper debt of gratitude than it does to many a famous maker of books. It is easy enough, Heaven knows, to make books, but to make them correct, Hic labor, hoc opus est.

A high authority in encyclopædical lore tells us that the best accredited authorities are at odds with regard to the birth or death of individuals in the enormous ratio of from twenty to twenty-five per cent of the whole number in the biographical dictionaries. The Portuguese poet Camoens is said by some authorities to have been born in 1517, and by others in 1525. Chateaubriand is declared by the English Cyclopædia to have been born September 4th, 1768; September 14th, 1768, by the Nouvelle Biographie générale of Dr. Hoefer; and September 4th, 1769, by the Conversations-Lexicon. Of course it is clear that all these authorities cannot be right, but which of the three is so, is matter of extreme doubt, leaving the student of facts perplexed and uncertain at the very point where certainty is not only most important, but most confidently expected.

Of another kind are the errors that sometimes creep into works of reference of high credit, by accepting too confidently statements publicly made. In one edition of the Dictionary of Congress a certain honorable member from Pennsylvania, in uncommonly robust health, was astonished to find himself recorded as having died of the National Hotel disease, contracted at Washington in 1856. In this case the editor of the work was the victim of too much confidence in the newspapers. In the Congressional Directory, where brief biographies of Congressmen are given, one distinguished member was printed as hav

ing been elected to Congress at a time which, taken in connection with his birth-date in the same paragraph, made him precisely one year old when he took his seat in Congress.

The statistics of the population of the globe, especially in remote ages, are among the things that must be set down as far more curious than valuable. It was long believed that the ancient world was vastly more populous than the modern, and that, too, on no better authority than that of such historians as Appian and Diodorus Siculus, who made out the population of Gaul to have been 200,000,000 at about the beginning of the Christian era, though in modern days it' is scarcely more than one sixth as much. Polybius tells us that the Romans could muster 700,000 men able to bear arms; and Julius Cæsar, according to Appian, in one of his freebooting excursions into what is now France, encountered 4,000,000 Gauls, killed 1,000,000, and made 1,000,000 prisoners. Is there any modern general, in any wars however bloody, carried on in countries however populous, who could boast conquests anywhere approaching these figures, even when divided by ten? Diodorus tells us in one place that the population of Egypt was 3,000,000—a moderate number enough; but then, in another place, he would have us believe that the number of cities in Egypt was 18,000, which, if there were but 3,000,000 people, is an evident contradiction, as it would give only 167 inhabitants to each city. The truth is, probably, he knew as much about the matter as we do of the population or the number of cities in the moon. Not a solitary writer of antiquity cites any census to prove his statements as to population, and of course no census existed. Diodorus tells us of the army of Ninus, the mythical founder of Babylon, that it consisted of 1,700,000 foot and 200,000 horse, and deprecates the scepticism of his contemporaries by saying that they must not form a notion of the ancient populousness of the earth by the degenerate and sparsely peopled times in which they lived. Thus a writer cotemporary with Cæsar and Augustus, in that very age now represented as the most populous, complains of the desolation which then prevailed, exalts the good old times when armies contained 2,000,000 men, and quotes ancient fables in support of his opinions. To count," said Dr. Johnson, “is a modern practice: the ancient method was to guess: and when numbers are guessed they are always magnified.” Yet writers of great reputation have repeated, almost down to our own days, the wildest exaggerations of antiquity. Even Montesquieu, writing near the middle of the last century, affirmed that by the best computations which the subject would admit of, there were not in his day, on the face of the earth, the fiftieth part of mankind which existed in the time of Julius Cæsar. The historian Hume remarks on this, that any such comparison must be imperfect, since we know not exactly the numbers of any country in Europe, or even of any city, at present: how then, he adds, can we pretend to calculate those of an

cient cities and States? Hume wrote just about 1752, when as yet no enumeration of the people had been taken even in England, the first census of the United Kingdom having been no farther back than 1801. In fact, the United States, just after becoming an independent republic, was the first nation to set the example of a census distinctly required in its fundamental law. Our first decennial census was taken in 1790.

As a fair example of the curiosities of statistics, take the arıny of Xerxes when it crossed the Hellespont to invade Greece. Herodotus gives it as 1,700,000 foot, 100,000 horse, and 517,000 naval forces; total, 2,317,000; and adds that the number was swollen by the attendants to 5,200,000 men; and all this to invade a country, which in no age known to history contained over 1,500,000 inhabitants! Another favorite myth of historians is the story of that famous Alexandrian Library of 700,000 volumes, burned by the Caliph Omar, A.D. 640, with a rhetorical dilemma in his mouth. Unfortunately for this highly dramatic tale, no two writers are agreed as to the circumstances, except as to the single fact, that there was a library at Alexandria, and that it ceased to exist in the seventh century. To ask a modern inquirer to believe that 700,000 books were gathered in one body 800 years before the invention of printing, while the largest library in the world, four centuries after the multiplication of books by printing began, contained less than 200,000 volumes, is altogether too great a stretch of credulity. Even in reporting the size of modern libraries, exaggeration holds sway. The library of George IV., inherited by that graceless ignoramus from a book-collecting father, and presented to the British nation with ostentatious liberality only after he had failed to sell it to Russia, was said in the publications of the time to contain about 120,000 volumes. But an actual enumeration when the books were lodged in the King's library at the British Museum, where they have ever since remained, showed that there were only 65,250 volumes, being but little more than half the reported number. Many libraries public and private are equally over-estimated. It is so much easier to guess than to count, and the stern test of arithmetic is too seldom applied, notwithstanding the fact that 100,000 volumes can easily be counted in a day by two or three persons, and so on in the same proportion. Here, as in the statistics of population, the same proverb holds good, that the unknown is always the magnificent, and on the surface of the globe we inhabit, the unexplored country is always the most marvellous since the world began.

Can any one tell us what is the true population of China? Variously set down in the books for the past 200 years at from 200,000,000 to 500,000,000, have we any right to strike an average, and call it, as does the Almanach de Gotha, 433,500,000? That teeming Oriental population excludes all calculation and baffles all conjecture. Though the fecundity of the human race there reaches its maximum, perhaps,

and approaches the marvellous, though generation after generation goes spawning on, apparently unchecked by wars, and undecimated by disease, no man can tell its numbers. Here are some statistics of the population of Chinese cities: In the Almanach de Gotha of 1877, there are set down four cities in China containing 1,000,000 or more of inhabitants, each; nine more having upwards of 500,000 each; ten cities of 250,000, or upwards; and twenty-five cities with more than 100,000 people each. If these statistics are true, Europe and America must hide their diminished heads. It is very probable, perhaps, that these swarming populations of Asia actually count as many human 1 creatures as they claim, but it is only fair to the rest of mankind to remark, that there is no proof of the fact. Trustworthy or harmonious estimates do not exist, and census there is none. Mr. George A. Seward, the American Minister to China, wrote in 1877: "In a country where we must make a long inquiry to learn whether the popu lation may more reasonably be set down at 200,000,000 or 400,000,000 of souls, it may be expected that data of a more refined sort will be lacking."

In illustration of the general indifference, if not incapacity, of the Oriental mind for statistical science, take the following remarkable letter published by Mr. Layard, the Oriental traveller, and written by a Turkish Cadi in reply to some inquiries concerning the commerce and population of his own city :

“MY ILLUSTRIOUS FRIEND, AND JOY OF MY LIVER!

"The thing you ask of me is both difficult and useless. Although I have passed all my days in this place, I have neither counted the houses, nor have I inquired into the number of the inhabitants; and as to what one person loads on his mules, and another stows away in the bottom of his ship, that is no business of mine. But, above all, as to the previous history of this city, God only knows the amount of dirt and confusion that the infidels may have eaten before the coming of the sword of Islam. It were unprofitable for us to inquire into it. O my soul! O my lamb! seek not after the things which concern thee not, Thou camest unto us and we welcomed thee: go in peace.

"Of a truth thou hast spoken many words; and there is no harm done, for the speaker is one and the listener is another. After the fashion of thy people, thou hast wandered from one place to another, until thou art happy and content in none. We (praise be to God) were born here, and never desire to quit it. Is it possible, then, that the idea of a general intercourse between mankind should make any impression on our understandings? God forbid !

"Listen, O my son! There is no wisdom equal unto the belief in God! He created the world: and shall we liken ourselves unto him in seeking to penetrate into the mysteries of his creation? Shall we say--behold this star spinneth around that star, and this other star with a tail goeth and cometh in so many years? Let it go! He, from whose hand it came, will guide and direct it.

"But thou wilt say unto me, stand aside, O man, for I am more learned than thou art, and have seen more things. If thou thinkest that thou art in this respect better than I am, thou art welcome. I praise God that I seek not that which I require not. Thou art learned in the things I care not for; and as for that which thou hast seen, I defile it. Will much knowledge create thee a double belly, or wilt thou seek paradise with thine eyes?