ABSTRACT
The appearance of statistics that chart the growth of science mirrors the fundamental institutional processes that characterize the century, and in particular the absorption of science into the various world wars. Fascination with numbers that describe science, with the scale and anatomy of the enterprise, has emerged over the twentieth-century in particular times and places. The growth of science, as a problem to be studied in its own right, was discovered in post-Sputnik America, for example. In telling the history of twentieth-century science through its statistics, we learn most not from the numbers themselves, but rather from asking who collected them, for what purposes, and how they chose their categories.
