ABSTRACT
The characters that statistics attempt to measure summarily are either attributes with two or more alternative qualities, or variables of different quantity. Political Science is more limited than Economics to qualitative characters, and an example of the statistical summarization of single qualitative attributes may be drawn from membership of the House of Commons. A frequent form of variation in physical and biological characters is a frequency distribution where there is neither one value almost universally observed, nor yet an equal number of items manifesting each value. A literary description would obviously be futile in all forms of distribution except those completely flat where all values are equally frequent, and those completely upstanding or thin where there is but one value to be found. Graham Wallas quotes an attempt on the part of a Permanent Secretary to the Irish Local Government Board to describe certain facts to a Royal Commission, in a more or less literary form.
