Authorship of the Natural and Political Observations Upon the Bills of Mortality

The purpose of this note is not to reopen an old controversy as to whether Petty or Graunt wrote the famous Natural and Political Observations upon the Bills of Mortality, but to put forward some new direct evidence on this matter which has been missed in previous investigations.' Since this evidence comes from the writings of contemporaries of Petty who were possibly acquainted with him, it is of some importance because it adds to the testimony to Petty's authorship of the Observations given by Aubrey, Evelyn, Halley, and Burnet.2 The important place of the Observations in the history of economic and social statistics makes this new evidence of some interest to the historian of ideas. The first of these writers who attributed the authorship of the Observations to Sir William Petty is John Houghton, who, like Petty, was a Fellow of the Royal Society, having been elected to that body at a meeting at which Petty was present as a member of its Council. It is therefore very likely that the two were personally acquainted, especially since they were interested in similar fields of scientific research.3 In his A Collection of Letters for the Improvement of Husbandry and Trade, which was published in 1681, Houghton made a direct reference to the authorship of the famous Observations on the Bills of Mortality in which he attributed that work to Petty, and not to Major Graunt, the generally accepted author, whose name appeared on most of the editions of that work

Archaeology · Natural (archaeology) · Political science · Politics · Historical Economic and Social Studies · History · Law

• History and the Political Economy

  James D Norris, Peter Temin et al.•The Journal of Interdisciplinary…•1972

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• The life of William Petty in relation to his economics

  Tony Aspromourgos•History of Political Economy•1988

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