There are many writers who would class Ward with the pre-scientific contributors to sociological thought. His methods, it is true, were largely deductive; his psychology was seriously faulty; his philosophy was inefficient. Nevertheless, he pointed the way for sociologists so clearly that in this treatise his work has been considered as giving the trend to recent sociology, rather than as being the last word of discredited types of social thought. Then there are other types of sociological methodology of which mention should be made, notably, the statistical, and the classificatory procedures. The statistical approach had its origin in the early census. There are evidences that rulers and kings, at least two or three millenniums before Christ, had enumerations of their subjects made. In connection with poor-law administration, people as early as the Roman Era were counted. But it was not until the eighteenth century that statistics became scientific, with statistical laws drawn from a study of tabulated facts. Quetelet gives 1820 as the birth year of statistical science. It was Frederick William I of Prussia who is reported to have had an enumeration made of occupational facts; and Frederick the Great, with having established a system for making regular statistical studies of population. It is said that early in the eighteenth century the University of Jena began to offer courses in statistics. In England, in the latter part of the seventeenth century, Captain John Graunt is credited with applying methods of counting, measurement, and induction to the births and deaths in London. His studies were referred to as political arithmetic, and were a forerunner of the current investigations in vital statistics. Malthus made use of statistical methods in his work (1798) on population changes. Quetelet (1796–1874) is usually considered the founder of statistical science. He not only applied the method of counting to the study of the members of human society (the census method in its common form), but he tried to get at the problem of causation, and to indicate rules of procedure for making causal studies in statistics. Although this celebrated Belgian statistician tabulated and analyzed facts ranging from the astronomical to the societary fields, his ideas can be mentioned here only so far as they contribute to the subject of social thought. Quetelet pointed out certain of the pitfalls in the way of gathering accurate data. He improved the methods of census taking, and undertook the difficult tasks that are involved in qualitative human studies.