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 176 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

form of the comparative and historical methods, namely, the statistical method. Every inductive science today is adopting this method. Physics, chemistry, astronomy, and geology, would be helpless without it. The biologists have acknowledged their dependence upon it by the establishment of a statistical journal, Biomctrica. It is not too much to claim that the possi- bilities of this now indispensable method of all the sciences were first demonstrated in the epoch-making social studies of Jacques Quetelet, and that its employment in sociology has been out of all proportion to its employment elsewhere. As developed in recent years by the Dane, Westergaard ; by Germans like Stein- hauser, Lexis, and Meyer ; by Italians, like Bodio ; by Frenchmen, like Lavasseur and Dumont ; by Englishmen, like Charles Booth, E. B. Tylor, Galton, Bowley. and Karl Pearson; by Americans, like Weber, Norton, Mayo-Smith, Cattell, Thorndike, and Boas, it has become, and will continue to be, the chiefly important method of sociology ; and assuredly, in the course of time, it will bring our knowledge of society up to standards of thoroughness and precision comparable to the results attained by any natural science.

FRANKLIN H. GIDDINGS.

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, New York City.