Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/809

Rh authorities (autorités sociales) that they desired to learn of. From here they made excursions into the immediate neighborhood to learn more definitely of the local influences that had to do with with the community they were studying. These were supplemented by geological explorations, by more extended explorations of the whole district, and finally by rapid journeys to entirely different districts and new fields of work. "The art of traveling" was with Le Play indeed an art.

His trip through the Harz Mountains and the surrounding districts was useful to him in two ways: First, his researches as a mineralogist were such as to make him at once prominent in that department and insure his continued usefulness to his government; while, secondly, he had had his liking for social investigation heightened and his ideas regarding the proper method of prosecuting these studies rendered more definite. On his return to Paris he took up his studies at once in the laboratory and in the tenement-houses; and so diligently were his researches subsequently carried on that there is hardly an important section of Europe which he did not finally visit. From Sheffield to the Ural Mountains, and from Norway even across the strait to Tangier, he prosecuted his studies regarding the lives and habits of the peasants and laborers, trying always not only to learn definitely of their environment and industrial life, but trying also to understand their thoughts and their mode of thinking. He considers the family the social unit, and is ever reiterating the idea that as the mineralogist studies the different minerals, or the botanist the different kinds of plants, so the student of social science must examine and analyze the individual families. To obtain systematic and cumulative results he developed a fixed method of observation, and a fixed terminology for recording the facts observed; thus rendering the work, even of different men, definite and comparable. All the facts regarding a given family were to be recorded in a monograph prepared according to an unvarying model. The first sixteen divisions of each monograph are always the same; the facts regarding any family are to be marshaled under these rubrics. Under the head of "General Description" the first five of these are grouped and include—1. Character of the soil, labor, and people; 2. Civil status of the family; 3. Religion and moral habits; 4. Hygiene and healthfulness; 5. Social station of the family. Then, under "Means of Existence," are grouped three of the subdivisions as follows: 6. Property; 7. Subventions; 8. The tasks of the different members of the family. Next, under "Manner of Existence," come—9. Food and meals; 10. House, furniture, and clothing; 11. Recreations. Finally, under the division "History of the Family," we find: 12. Principal phases of its history; 13. Customs and institutions assuring the physical and moral well-being of the family; 14. Budget of receipts for the year; 15. Budget of expenses for the year; 16. Family accounts annexed to the budgets. Beyond the sixteenth