. . . AND THREE."
We have always - suspected statisticians to be a mean- souled, sublunary race of men, incapable of the higher thing's. Never has our suspicion received such striking. confirmation as when we read, the other day, that : "Exactly 1,335,617,903.1bs. of chocolates and candies were consumed in the U.S.A. in 1930." Consider the. implications of those figures. The last three, more especially, are in themselves an indictment of the compilers. One would have thought that the body of men.L. numerically, without doubt, a Considerable one-=responsible for calculating this total would at least have shown, in the execution of their irrelevant and ridiculous task, some-measure of the craftsman's pride. They would have gone all out for a round number, and got one. Rather than publish a result which fell short of symmetry by so narrow a margin, and thus expose their attitude' towards their life-work as a revolting cornponid of the slovenly and the meticulous, they should have abstained, during their calculations, from the consumption of chocolate and for candy ; then, with the total in sight, they shcinkl have made a carefully adjusted attack on a quantity of these delicacies of the 1930 vintage (we do not donbt that the Society for Tidying Up American Thought : would have sup- plied them gratis). Such an orgy, undertaken from the most abstract and disinterested of motives, would have compelled respect The spectacle of :a roomful of statisticians eating 87 lbs. of stale sweetmeats in order to round off the national consumption figures would have been an ennobling one. But the attempt was not made. The adders remained deaf to the challenge of their art. We think worse than ever of statisticians.
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