Quételct, LAMBERT ADOLPHE JACQUES

Quételct, LAMBERT ADOLPHE JACQUES, a celebrated Belgian statistician and astronomer, was born at Ghent, 22d February 1796, and studied at the lyceum of his native city. Here at eighteen he began to teach mathematics, and five years later was appointed to this chair at the Brussels Athenæum. He superintended the building of the Royal Observatory, and became its director in 1828, while in 1836 he accepted the chair of Astronomy and Geodesy at the Brussels Military School. From 1834 he was perpetual secretary of the Belgian Royal Academy. He died 17th February 1874. His scientific work lay mostly in the regions of meteorology and statistics relating to anthropology. His greatest book is Sur l'Homme et le Développement de ses Facultés (1835), in which he sums up his researches on the physical and intellectual qualities of man. Both in this and in later work in the Bulletin de la Commission Centrale de Statistique, in l'Anthropométrie, ou Mesure des différentes Facultés de l'Homme (1871), and in other books and papers he shows the use that may be made of the theory of probabilities, as applied to the 'average man'—at times carrying out that method so as to arrive at a mechanical precision not justified by facts, and rejected by later writers on 'mind statistics.' Quételct's contributions to meteorology, astronomy, terrestrial magnetism, &c., in the Mémoires and Bulletins of the Belgian Royal Academy, were numerous and important. See Mailly's Essai sur la Vie et les Travaux de Quételct (1875), and Wolowski's Éloge (1875).