Page:Hull 1900 Petty's Place in the History of Economic Theory.djvu/2

308 and Bergmann —I select two writers who assign to Petty a prominent place—seems to lie quite as much in the intellectual stimulus afforded by a comprehensive survey of the subject from differing points of view as in any contribution made to our understanding of the way in which knowledge grows or theory accretes. No doubt a closer and closer interfiliation of theories does take place as the class of professional economists becomes more numerous and active, the discussions in journals more frequent and animated. But two hundred years ago our apparatus for conserving and incubating economic ideas did not exist. Writers of that day for the most part turned their attention but casually to the field of economic pamphleteering, and were as disregardful of their predecessors as their successors were of them. In treating of a seventeenth-century economist, therefore, I believe that more false inferences will be avoided than truths overpassed by refusing to recognize any lines of descent except those that can be clearly proved in court.

  William Petty was born May 26, 1623, at Romsey, in Hampshire, where his father was a poor clothier. Like many another English refugee during the Civil War, he made his way, by various shifts, to Utrecht and Leyden. There, as well as in Amsterdam and Paris, he studied languages, chemistry, and medicine. In 1648 the Parliamentary party, bent upon reorganizing Royalist Oxford, made him Fellow of Brasenose College, and soon afterwards Professor of Anatomy. Two years later he was further advanced to be physician for the army in Ireland, and soon became a confidant of Henry Cromwell, whom he served as clerk of the council at Dublin until shortly before the 