The birth of statistics and the origins of the new natural science (Q1605858)

The author sketches the history of statistics up to the 19th century. He believes that the same causes occasioned both its birth and the origin of modern natural sciences; notes Sébastien Le Prestre Vauban's priority (1686) in suggesting proposals for a national census; and describes the prehistory of the Staatswissenschaft, or university statistics (Italy, 16th and early 17th centuries). The merging of the two main branches of statistics is indirectly dated as ca. 1800 (actually, it occurred many decades later) and Leibniz' work in polictical arithmetic is ignored. Vauban's role in the general development of statistics is greatly exaggerated but at the same time, his sampling study of the agricultural production in France is not mentioned.