No statements of mere averages... are of the least avail against our statistics. Fluctuations from the averages are the sole reliable test... - Karl Pearson

For the present the Grammar may yet be of service. After an eight years' life and... 4000 copies, it reappears in a revised and enlarged form.

Scarcely any specialist of to-day is really master of all the work which has been done in his own comparatively small field. Facts and their classification have been accumulating at such a rate that nobody seems to have leisure to recognise the relations of sub-groups to the whole. It is as if individual workers... were bringing their stones to one great building and piling them on and cementing them... without regard to any general plan... only where some one has placed a great corner stone... the building... rises... more rapidly... till it... is stopped for want of side support. Yet this great structure... possesses a symmetry and unity... in scientific method. The smallest group of facts, if properly classified and logically dealt with, ...has its proper place... wholly independent of the individual workman who... shaped it. Even when two men work unwittingly at the same stone they will but modify and correct each other... In the face of all this enormous progress... when in all civilised lands men are applying the scientific method... the goal of science is and must be infinitely distant.

[T]he records of the tables are published in... Le Monaco and issued weekly in Paris... eight weeks roulette gave a grand total of 33,000 events. ...M. Blanc deserved a niche in the temple of science and Le Monaco a shelf in every mathematician's library.