ABSTRACT
Look at any curve on a graph, for example of criminal or minor second offences in the last fifty years. Don’t those traits have a physiognomy, if not like that of the human face, at least like the silhouette of hills and valleys, or rather, since we are concerned here with movement – for we speak so appropriately in statistics of fluctuations in crime or births or marriages – like the twists and turns, the sudden dives, the sharp ascents in the flight of a swallow?
