The Philosophical Breakfast Club (27 page)

British political economists could turn to numerous eminent historians, past and present, whose work provided historical facts of interest. But Britain had no society or group to facilitate the gathering and systematizing of statistical information. Here, Jones noted pointedly, economists could learn from the natural philosophers, especially those who had recently formed the British Association. “The cultivators of physical science,” he told his listeners, “have set a brilliant and useful example. There is hardly a department in the province which has not the advantage of being pursued by societies of men animated by a common object, and collecting and recording facts under the guidance of philosophical views. We may hope, surely, that mankind and their concerns will soon attract interest enough to receive similar attention; and that a statistical society will be added to the number of those which are advancing scientific knowledge of England.”
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(Jones was, as usual, depressed after the lecture. Whewell chided him: “What amount of success will satisfy you? If you expect that the whole lecture room should rush from their seats and lift you in their arms declaring you the emperor of economists, the thing will not be done!”)
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Whewell began plotting a way for Jones’s speech to have a lasting impact. The next month, in the midst of planning the logistics of the Cambridge meeting, Whewell wrote to Jones with an interesting proposition: “I want to talk to you about getting statistical information, [and] if the British Association is to be made subservient to that, … which I think would be well.”
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They began to plan a kind of coup d’etat of the society. This coup would rely on the presence in Cambridge of the Belgian astronomer and statistician Adolphe Quetelet.

Whewell had met Quetelet in Hamburg in 1829. Quetelet was doing groundbreaking work in a field he called
physique sociales
, or social physics. At that time Quetelet was the founding director of the Royal Observatory of Belgium (which would not be operational until several years later), a position he held until his death in 1874. Taking astronomy as his model, Quetelet was trying to fashion a method for scientifically studying men in society. He was particularly interested in the astronomer’s use of the “method of least squares,” which employed the probabilistic notion of an
“error curve” to explain the existence of variations among observations of the same celestial object. Herschel, for instance, used this method extensively in his analysis of the observations of the double stars. What this method did in astronomy was to introduce the notion of a “statistical regularity” among large sets of observational data. Quetelet decided to apply this notion in a way that had never been done before, to data sets about human activities such as marriage, crime, and suicide.
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Both Jones and Whewell had unsuccessfully implored Quetelet to attend the British Association meeting in Oxford in 1832.
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Whewell made a special effort to attract him to the Cambridge meeting, promising him comfortable rooms at Trinity during his stay. This time Quetelet did come, armed with an account of his statistical work on suicide and crime rates, gathered from a comprehensive study of the records of the French criminal courts between 1826 and 1831—the results of which would soon be published in his pioneering book, the
Treatise on Man
, where Quetelet presented his conception of
l’homme moyen
, the average man, an abstract being, defined in terms of the average of all human attributes in a given country.
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Quetelet argued that deviations from this average canceled themselves out when large numbers of instances were considered, just as deviations in large numbers of astronomical observations tended to cancel each other. The same reasoning is used today in such commonly employed expressions as “the age of the average woman at marriage,” or “the number of years of education among the average twenty-five-year-old man.”

As there was no section of the British Association that could accommodate a paper on such topics, Jones invited Quetelet, along with Whewell, Babbage, the aged Malthus, and others, to his rooms at Caius College on the evening of June 26, and Quetelet delivered his paper there. At this gathering, Whewell and Jones announced their plan to form a “statistical section” of the British Association. The men purposely circumvented the organization’s rules by not going through the General Committee. Instead, the next morning, Babbage presented the new section—Section F—as a fait accompli to Sedgwick, the president of the association that year. (In his autobiography, published over thirty years later, Babbage characteristically takes credit for the idea and execution of creating the new section.)

Some members of the British Association worried that allowing discussions of statistics would result in the introduction of charged political issues involving the poor laws, land reforms, and others. Politically,
things remained tense in Britain. The Reform Bill had been passed by Parliament the year before, increasing the number of men eligible to vote from about 400,000 to nearly 650,000, about one in six British men; some thought the bill went too far in extending voting rights, while some felt it had not gone far enough.
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And the New Poor Law, which would force paupers into workhouses in order to receive relief, was still being debated, and would pass the following year. Sedgwick, obliged to ameliorate the situation, gave a speech to the assembled members in which he presented the new section as existing for the purpose of discussing facts and figures that could function as the “raw material to political economy and political philosophy,” without allowing discussions of politics itself, which would arouse “bad passion and party animosity,” and allow the “foul demon of discord” to enter into their “Eden of philosophy.”
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Although Sedgwick’s speech made it sound as if the Statistical Section would be confined to the mere blind collection of unconnected facts, that was certainly not the intention of Whewell and the other founding members. As Bacon had noted, and as Whewell had emphasized in his speech earlier in the week to the General Meeting, the man of science was not supposed to be like the ant, piling up facts like crumbs, but like the bee, who takes the specks of pollen, digests them, and turns them into honey. Whewell had told the assembled men of science that “facts can only become portions of knowledge as they become classed and connected … they can only constitute truth when they are included in general propositions.”
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Merely piling up facts was unproductive. What was needed instead was the gathering of these facts into laws, especially economic laws, which could be used to diagnose and treat the ills of society.

Whewell did, however, share Sedgwick’s concern that the Statistical Section would become the stage for rancorous political debates overshadowing the scientific work—and this is precisely what happened. The Statistical Section soon became the most controversial of the sections at the yearly meetings, often the setting for angry confrontations between the speaker and his audience. At the 1835 meeting, for example, William Langton delivered a paper attacking Lord Brougham’s claim that education of the poor had increased in the past twenty-five years (it would be another forty-five years before the Education Act required all children to attend school up to the age of ten). Alexis de Tocqueville, visiting from France soon after publishing the first volume of
Democracy in America
, was there to witness the mêlée that broke out among some members of the
crowd. Eventually the British Association resolved the problem by assigning the section meetings of the Statistical Section to small rooms, withholding grant monies, and confining the published notices of statistical papers to mere tables of numbers, thus contravening the possibility of controversial political conclusions.
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In March 1834, Babbage and Jones—realizing that Section F would always be under the control of the British Association’s General Committee—founded the autonomous London Statistical Society (now known as the Royal Statistical Society). Although Whewell was not at the initial meeting, he was happy to be named one of the members of the council.
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But the London Statistical Society, like Section F of the British Association, witnessed its share of rancor and unruliness. Eventually it, too, tried to defuse such tensions by describing itself as concerned exclusively with facts divorced from all theory. It is not surprising that soon after this development, Whewell, Babbage, and even Jones lost interest in the society, and ceased active participation in it. Whewell explained to Quetelet that “they would go on better if they had some zealous
theorists
among them.… Unconnected facts are of comparatively small value.”
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Nevertheless, the three men had sparked a new movement in England, one that would give shape to the newly forming “social sciences” as well as alter indelibly the physical sciences. Quetelet’s doctrine of a “statistical law,” with its assumption of regularities in seemingly irrational phenomena such as suicide and crime, would come to be a critical tool in the effort to reduce disorder into order by the use of analysis on large numbers of data, even data about the natural world in areas outside observational astronomy. For instance, when he devised his brilliant statistical gas law, James Clerk Maxwell used Quetelet’s formulation of the error law—he had learned of it by reading Herschel’s review of one of Quetelet’s books.
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Francis Galton would later use these same methods in his study of heredity, adding support for his half-cousin Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, while also, less auspiciously, pioneering the field he called “eugenics.”

T
HE
B
RITISH
A
SSOCIATION
meetings were eagerly anticipated by attendees and by the local pub owners, innkeepers, and managers of other locales that would be frequented by those who traveled to attend the gathering. Towns vied with each other to host the meetings, promising
spacious and elegant meeting rooms, large assembly halls for the public lectures, elegant catered meals (called “ordinaries”), balls, entertainments, exhibitions, excursions, and accommodation in hotels and private houses. A combination of local pride, civic rivalry, and the desire to share in the spectacle created events that became part of the local lore.

The British Association changed the way science was done, and not only in Britain. For the first time, science became very much a public activity. Unlike the Royal Society, which held meetings that few of its 740-odd members even bothered to attend, or the Royal Academy of Sciences in France, whose members were forced to attend, but did not number beyond several hundred, the British Association was attended by thousands—not only men of science, but also local manufacturers and noblemen, and their wives and daughters. Babbage remarked that an important benefit of the meetings was that they would encourage a wide range of people to “get a little imbued with love for science.”
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Tens of thousands of others read about the meetings in the local and national newspapers and journals.
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The general public heard of the social events, the lectures, and even the scientific papers that were read and discussed at the meetings. Those lucky enough to travel to the meetings or live in the host towns could go hear the lectures, meet the natural philosophers at the conversaziones, and partake of the many field trips that were offered. At the Bristol meeting in 1836, visitors had a smorgasbord of choices (in addition to the meetings and lectures): inspections of the shipbuilding yards, two zoological gardens, and twenty different manufactories, including gas works, an anchor foundry, a steam-engine factory, a paper plant, a confectionery, a brewery, and two sugar refineries.
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The audience for this public display of scientific knowledge included women, hundreds of them at a time. This was in stark contrast to the usual exclusion of women from the scientific establishment at this time. They were explicitly barred from membership in the scientific societies, even the British Association. By encouraging members to bring their wives and daughters to the meetings, however, the British Association opened a crack in the door that would soon be flung wide open.

Initially the women mainly attended the public lectures and the social events. At the first meeting in York, “not less than a hundred fashionable ladies” attended Scoresby’s lecture on magnetism, the
Yorkshire Gazette
reported.
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The sale of “ladies’ tickets” to the evening lectures became a major source of revenue for the association. But soon women began to
infiltrate the section meetings, from which they were ostensibly barred. Before the Bristol meeting, the organizers worried that one of the section meeting rooms held only 350 people, so that “it may be necessary to enforce almost absolutely the law as to the exclusion of ladies from the sections.”
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By the next year, after the Liverpool meeting, Murchison would announce triumphantly to Harcourt that “the sections here have been excellent, and Sedgwick as president of the geological surpassed himself. He smitted the hearts of all the ladies of whom we had 300 daily in our gallery.”
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Women had already been attending lectures at the Royal Institution, but those lectures were specifically designed for women and others unschooled in science. Jones playfully coined the word
merry-miss-mology
to describe the education of women at the Royal Institution, asking Whewell, still known as a ladies’ man, “Should you not like to be the first Professor and give instruction in merrymismology?”
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But their de facto (and, eventually, de jure) admission to the section meetings of the British Association granted women access to science as it was practiced by the men of science themselves. To be sure, there were uncomfortable moments, as when in the zoological section Richard Owen was forced to modify his discussion of marsupial reproduction “as delicately as possible.”
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