Recherches sur la Probabilité des Jugements en matière criminelle et en matière civile, précédées des règles générales du calcul des probabilités.

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First edition of Poisson's important work on the probability of criminal and civil verdicts, "in large part a treatise on probability theory after the manner of Laplace, with an emphasis on the behaviour of means of large numbers of measurements" (Stigler, pp. 182-3). "The legitimacy of the application of the calculus to areas relating to the moral order, that is to say within the broad area of what is now called the humanistic sciences, was bitterly disputed beginning in 1820 in politically conservative circles as well as by Saint-Simonians and by such philosophers as Auguste Comte. Poisson was bold enough to take pen in hand to defend the universality of the probabilistic thesis and to demonstrate the conformability to the order of nature of the regularities that the calculus of probability, without recourse to hidden causes, reveals when things are subjected to a great number of observations. It is to Poisson that we owe the term 'law of large numbers'. He improved Laplace's work by relating it explicitly to Jacob Bernoulli's fundamental theorem and by showing that the invariance in the prior probabilities of mutually exclusive events is not a necessary condition for calculating the approximate probabilities. It is also from Poisson that we derive the study of a problem that Laplace had passed over, the case of great asymmetry between opposite events, such that the prior probability of either event is very small" (DSB). The copy of the Danish statistician Anders Hald (1913-2007), with his ownership signature to front free endpaper. Hald served as professor at the University of Copenhagen from 1960 to 1982. Quarto (259 x 191 mm). Contemporary half calf, blue label, brown cloth sides. 20th century bookplate to front pastedown, neat early notation to half-title. Calf a little stripped, rubbed, some foxing, minor pencil marginalia. A very good copy. Seller Inventory # 153292

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