Page:American Anthropologist NS vol. 1.djvu/538

 powell] SOCIOLOGY, OR THE SCIENCE OF INSTITUTIONS 479

necessary, for they are used as a basis for national and state legislation. School districts must have an enumeration of the children of school age who are to be provided with schooling facilities. The county must have an enumeration of the persons who require charity that it may provide for their assistance. If the state builds an asylum for the blind, it must have the number of the persons to be entertained therein. Statistics are required by all sorts of business enterprises in order that men may act with intelligence. Thus, a life insurance company bases its rates of insurance on tables of statistics which show the probable average duration of life from the age at which the insured persons severally applied. All intelligent action in business enterprise is dependent largely on accurate statistical information. This func- tion of statistics we will designate as the function of information.

Statistics are compared for different conditions to exhibit im- portant relations of social life as causes of good or evil effects. The comparison is made of numbers taken at different periods in the history of a people for the purpose of exhibiting the evolu- tion of social conditions. This leads us to the consideration of statistics in verification.

So common is this use that it would not be a bad definition to say that statistics is the science of the verification of sociologic inferences. The statesman, whose vocation is the study of prac- tical government, deals largely with statistics, and the sociologist, whose theme deals with the social structure and its functions, re- sorts to statistics for the verification of his doctrine. In this use of statistics the greatest care is necessary in order that unsound doctrines may not receive apparent confirmation.

We may assume that kinds are properly discriminated, that measures are reasonably accurate, that enumerations are well taken, and that comparisons are wisely made. There yet remains a large field in the use of figures in verification in which they may be perverted to the sustaining of fallacies. This is the large field in which they are habitually used to verify theories of social evo-

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