Now that statistics is a branch of mathematics, it is easy to imagine that its use in the field of human affairs is a by-product of modern science’s way of looking at the world. Historical study contradicts such an idea: it is in the field of human affairs that quantitative statistics have developed, and it is only afterwards that it became a method for the natural sciences. Most physicists in the 19th century considered statistics all too human to have a place in the scientific study of nature. It took all Maxwell’s authority and persuasion to make statistical analysis a new style of scientific thought in physics.