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History of Meteorology 8 (2017)
 

	
  

54 

 
 
 

Redeeming Belgian Science:  
Periodic Phenomena and Global Physics in Brussels, 1825-1870 

 

 
Kevin Donnelly 

kevin.donnelly@alvernia.edu  
Alvernia University 

 

 

 

 

Introduction: a nation at the margins of science 

 

In 1864, at the age of 68, the renowned Belgian astronomer, statistician, and all-around savant 
Adolphe Quetelet published a strange compendium on two topics which might seem to have little 
relation to one another: a history of Belgian science and a survey of what Quetelet called “periodic 
phenomena,” a wide-ranging survey of natural and meteorological data that he had been collecting 
for over three decades. The book, Histoire des sciences mathématique et physique chez les belges, 
devoted most of its 500 pages to the former subject: the rise and fall of scientific progress in a 
region which had, since the Middle Ages, been the subject of division, stagnation, benign neglect, 
active exploitation, and little in the way of homogeny in language, ethnicity or religion. In his 
triumphalist narrative, Quetelet explained that les belges had begun as “primitive” and “brave” 
people who were “far from having” the “intelligence” and “industry” of the later state.1 The reason 
for their rise, he argued, had been contact with foreign neighbors and that the “notable advance” 
of his country occurred because of the “many relations with foreign nations…which left their 
marks on our ancestors.”2 Indeed, international collaboration in science was nearly synonymous 
with progress in Histoire des sciences, as events as distant as the 100 Years War demonstrated: 
when the King of France sought to take possession of Belgian lands from Phillip Artevelede, 
Quetelet claimed that the “agitation of spirits was extreme and not conducive to the development 
of science.”3 And so it went throughout the years, as internationalists like Charles V, born in 

	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
1 Adolphe Quetelet, Histoire des sciences mathématique et physique chez les belges, new ed. (Brussels: Muquart, 
1871), 18. All translations from the French are my own unless otherwise noted. 
2 Ibid., 43.  
3 Ibid., 50. 



History of Meteorology 8 (2017)
 

	
  

55 

Quetelet’s hometown of Ghent, led scientific advances while the disasters of the Napoleonic Wars 
brought ruin to his home region. 

 As a general point, few would argue with Quetelet that international collaboration in the 
sciences is best accomplished in times of peace, and Quetelet was not the first nor the last Belgian 
to make the case for internationalism in science.4 Henri Pirenne, the noted Belgian nationalist 
historian, had in fact made the case that Belgium was a “nation of borders,” which inevitably 
shaped the culture and ideas of the country.5 As an internationalist, Quetelet was certainly no 
different from many other propagandists like Humboldt and Herschel in the heady years of 
nineteenth-century international collaboration. Yet what makes this history so interesting is the 
plan Quetelet appended to his history of Belgian science: a 100-page programmatic and 
methodological treatise on collecting data on “periodic phenomena,” a topic broad enough to 
include shooting stars, meteorological events, terrestrial magnetism, wind and sea currents, and a 
handful of other natural phenomena. In fact, Quetelet listed 12 “genres of observation” which had 
“occupied me since the beginning of my career,” none of which, it might be noted, was related to 
either classical astronomy or statistics, the two fields in which Quetelet is best known today.6 
Though clearly important in retrospect, why was such work included as a capstone to, or even 
justification of, Belgian science? What connected wind-speed calculations and temperatures 
readings in the 1850s to the disastrous invasions and occupations that marked the history of the 
Low Countries? Why did Quetelet not champion Belgian accomplishments in fields such as 
astronomy, which he taught, or physics and mathematics, topics he focused on as an editor of an 
international journal?7 And, perhaps most interestingly for the later development of meteorology, 
how did a figure like Quetelet, an early Laplacian determinist trained in the French Positivist 
tradition, come to see the inchoate field of “periodic phenomena” as the best hope for a Belgian 
scientific revival?   

This paper will argue that the answer to these questions can be found in the project to 
collect data on periodic phenomena itself, particularly within the geographical, historical, and 
political contexts of the Low Countries. As Quetelet learned in attempting to create a nascent 
scientific movement in Belgium, the data of periodic phenomena, and what he would later call 
global physics, was far better suited for a small and politically marginalized country than a field 
like astronomy, which required significant financial resources and international clout in order to 
make new discoveries. Quetelet, who had studied and taught in institutions created during both the 

	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
4 For a good overview of internationalism in science during periods of war, see Elizabeth Crawford, “The Universe of 
International Science, 1880-1939,” in Solomon’s House Revisited: The Organization and Institutionalization of 
Science, ed. Tore Frängsmyr (Canton, MA: Science History Publications, 1990). For later Belgians who focused on 
internationalism, see Alex Wright, Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age (Oxford: 
Oxford University Press, 2014) and Lewis Pyenson and Christophe Verbruggen, “Ego and the International: the 
Modernist Circle of George Sarton,” Isis 100, no. 1 (2009): 60-78. 
5 Henri Pirenne, La Nation belge (Brussels: Guyot, 1899), 3. 
6 Quetelet, Histoire, 377.  
7 In the 1820s, Quetelet had published Astronomie populaire and Astronomie élémentaire based on his lectures at the 
Athénée de Bruxelles and had been the editor for 11 years of Correspondance mathématique et physique.  



History of Meteorology 8 (2017)
 

	
  

56 

era of Hapsburg benevolent neglect and the far more destructive Napoleonic occupation, sought 
smaller projects for the new nation of The United Kingdom of the Netherlands (1815-1830) and 
later Belgium (created in 1830). As will be seen, the geographic location of such a project was 
ironic, as Quetelet’s earliest research came from Brussels, a city that while geographically situated 
in the center of Europe was often at the margins of scientific life.8 It was here that Quetelet inverted 
traditional methodological imperatives in his efforts to create a national scientific project founded 
on internationalism.   

Though much work remains to be done on Quetelet’s project to assemble data on periodic 
phenomena, the focus here will be on research Quetelet conducted in Brussels as well as a selection 
from a wide range of methodological papers spanning over three decades.9 As will be seen, the 
only consistency in this work is Quetelet’s insistence on international collaboration. For example, 
in Histoire des sciences, the last item on Quetelet’s list of 12 “genres of observations” was what 
he called a “united project of weights and measures across different countries.” Such a plan was 
indeed accomplished at the 1853 International Maritime Conference in Brussels, a meeting now 
recognized by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as the moment when 
coordinated meteorological observations began.10 Reporting a decade after the event to the 
Académie Royale de Belgique on the conference’s success, Quetelet left little doubt about its 
importance for Brussels. The goal of the conference was nothing less than to “perfect meteorology 
and global physics and to search for the laws which rule the great natural phenomena,” and 
Quetelet believed it a great triumph that the meeting was being held in a city that had contributed 
so little to previous science, one just kilometers from his birthplace in Ghent.11 Though dreamed 
up by the American naval officer Matthew Maury, the meeting was held in Brussels because of 
the respect Quetelet had gained for international collaboration, and he was unanimously elected 
president of the conference for his indefatigable efforts to bring researchers together.12 It was an 
endorsement of the new science that Quetelet had been cultivating for decades – decentralized, 
multifocal, and international – and one that had its ultimate roots in the particularities of the Low 
Countries and Brussels. At a celebration of his life 200 years later, Quetelet was credited by a 
fellow Belgian with “extracting us from mediocrity and elevating us to international 

	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
8 On the larger move away from “classical probability,” see Lorraine Daston, Classical Probability in the 
Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), Gerd Gigerenzer, Lorenz Krüger, and Mary S. 
Morgan, ed., The Probabilistic Revolution, Volume 1: Ideas in History (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1987), Ian 
Hacking, The Emergence of Probability: A Philosophical Study of Early Ideas and Probability, Induction and 
Statistical Interference (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1984), and Theodore Porter, Trust in Numbers 
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995).   
9 The best source for this work remains “Bicentenaire de la naissance d’Adolphe Quetelet (1796 – 1874) fondateur de 
l’observatoire de Bruxelles,” Bulletin Astronomique de l’Observatoire Royale de Belgique 11, no.1 (1996): 1-114. 
10 Hervé le Treut et. al, “Historical Overview of Climate Change Science,” in Climate Change 2007: The Physical 
Sciences Basis, ed. S. Solomon et. al (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 100. 
11 Adolphe Quetelet, “Sure la météorologie et la conférence maritime tenue à Bruxelles,” Bulletin de la Académie 
Royale de Belgique 20 (1853): 29. 
12 Adolphe Quételet, Notice sur le Capitaine M. F. Maury, Associé de l'Académie Royale de Belgique (Brussels, 1874). 



History of Meteorology 8 (2017)
 

	
  

57 

recognition.”13 Periodic phenomena, it seems, did provide the antidote to the instability and 
stagnation that had hindered previous Belgian science. 

A focus on data collection for periodic phenomena at the Brussels Observatory can help 
contribute to the early history of meteorology by demonstrating how the historical weakness of 
Belgium – the lack of a powerful and unified nation-state – became a strength for the new science. 
Indeed, in contrast to the vision in Histoire des sciences, many of the most important statistical 
insights from this period came about because of the chaotic early years of the observatory and the 
marginal status of the Catholic Low Countries. Earlier visions of international scientific 
collaboration in astronomy were dominated by the powerful observatories in Greenwich and Paris, 
but meteorology and climatology were sciences that demanded international collaboration and 
could not be judged by just one or two locations. Indeed, in the middle of the nineteenth century, 
the overabundance of star charts and ephemeris led many people to question the need for so many 
locations of scientific reportage.14 Simon Newcombe at the US Naval Observatory, for example, 
complained that most star catalogues produced by observatories were “unnecessary,” but that 
would likely carry on due to “national pride.”15 As J.A. Bennet has noted of the era’s observatory 
fever: “utility alone could scarcely have excused the duplication of effort brought about by more 
and more observatories.”16 Observatories then were at the same time powerful sites of nationalism 
and ostentation,17 and Quetelet imagined periodic phenomena as the means through which a 
marginal observatory could contribute to the new sciences. Hence his enthusiasm in combining 
periodic phenomena with the historical legacy of Belgium in Histoire des sciences: the 1853 
International Maritime conference – a perfect marriage of bureaucracy and statistics – was where 
the peripheral city of Brussels could become the center of the meteorological world, a first step in 
the creation of what has been called “infrastructural globalism” on which much of meteorology 
and climate science were built.18 

While recent work in “relocating” the sciences has focused on localities far from Europe,19 
relocating meteorology to the geographical center of the Western European metropole may 
provide a corollary contribution: a suggestion that the work at the Brussels observatory and the 

	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
13 Robert André, "Adolphe Quetelet, Académicien," in Actualité et Universalité de la Pensée Scientifique d’Adolphe 
Quetelet: Actes du Colloque Organisé à l'Occasion du Bicentenaire de sa Naissance (Brussels: Académie Royale de 
Belgique, 1997), 23. 
14 See the many complaints found in Kevin Donnelly, “On the Boredom of Science: Positional Astronomy in the 
Nineteenth Century,” in The British Journal for the History of Science 47, no. 3 (2014): 479-503. 
15 Simon Newcombe, Reminiscences of an Astronomer (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903), 62. 
16 J. A. Bennett, “The English Quadrant in Europe: Instruments and the Growth of Consensus in Practical Astronomy,” 
Journal for the History of Astronomy 23 (1992), 2. 
17 For the ways in which many observatories overcame this limitation, see Charlotte Bigg, David Aubin, and H. Otto 
Sibum, eds., The Heavens on Earth: Observatories and Astronomy in Nineteenth-Century Science and Culture 
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 
18 Paul N. Edwards, “Meteorology as Infrastructural Globalism,” in Osiris 21 (2006): 229-250, 230. For the expanded 
arguments, see Paul N. Edwards, A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global 
Warming (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2010). 
19 Kapil Raj, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 
1650-1900 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 



History of Meteorology 8 (2017)
 

	
  

58 

subsequent “infrastructural globalism” created in Belgium helped to push meteorology away from 
its deterministic roots, where Laplacian laws and positivistic philosophies of science had been a 
burden for early meteorologists.20 A recent history has claimed that determinism functioned as a 
“chimera” that had inhibited the field because “there [was] no superhuman forecasting demon with 
unlimited observational power and unlimited dynamical knowledge.”21 One of the best recent 
histories of meteorology similarly described the “passing away of the belief in the determinacy of 
atmospheric behavior” as “momentous” for the science.22 In what follows, I hope to show one way 
in which the determinism problem was eroded: rather than imagining periodic phenomena as a 
secondary feature of a pre-determined atmosphere, Quetelet’s work in Brussels helped to see it as 
autonomous phenomenon. It was not coincidental, I argue, that this movement came from outside 
the major capitals of European science. 

In tracing how the unique dynamics of Bruxellois data helped to foster a new form of 
international collaboration while subsequently helping to challenge meteorology’s determinism 
problem, I begin with Quetelet’s earliest work on periodic phenomena which he directed from his 
position as Royal Astronomer at the Brussels Observatory. Though the observatory was a great 
triumph, some of Quetelet’s most important ideas on causation came while he was waiting out 
construction delays, bureaucratic wrangling, and the 1830 revolution that gave birth to modern 
Belgium. For close to a decade, Quetelet was in fact forced to look to demographic statistics in 
Brussels instead of astronomical data, a formative period that would later shape his thinking on 
periodic phenomena. The second section then examines Quetelet’s work in physique du globe, 
where he sought to separate meteorology from the more rigid Laplacian sciences. Notably, 
Quetelet began to make these distinctions in response to the practical needs of his observatory and 
demographic statistics as much as any deeper philosophical considerations or lessons from 
astronomy. Rather than the direction one might imagine, where meteorological insights were built 
from reflection on astronomical conditions, Quetelet inverted the positivistic arrow, using social 
data to influence his thinking on the weather, which in turn led him to divorce it from the 
movements of the heavens.23 In the third section, I return not only to the International Maritime 
Conference of meteorologists in 1853, but another conference held the same year in Brussels: the 
first International Statistical Conference. Most observers at the time believed the future of 
meteorology lay in the replication of astronomical work, and few at either conference would have 

	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
20 David Aubin has particularly noted how the observatory helped redefine the idea of science. See David Aubin, “A 
history of observatory sciences and techniques, ” in Astronomy at the Frontiers of Science, ed. Jean-Pierre Lasota 
(Dordrecht, 2011): 109-21, 115.  
21 James Rodger Fleming, Inventing Atmospheric Science: Bjerkens, Rossby, Wexler and the Foundation of Modern 
Meteorology (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2016), 25. For how mathematicians worked out this problem, see Ian 
Roulstone and John Norbury, Invisible in the Storm: The Role of Mathematics in Understanding Weather (Princeton, 
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013). 
22 Frederick Nebeker, Calculating the Weather: Meteorology in the 20th Century (New York: Academic Press, 1995), 
188. 
23 As Porter has shown, Quetelet’s work was part of a larger movement in which many of the physical and natural 
sciences adopted the tools of the social sciences, rather than the other way around. Theodore M. Porter, The Rise of 
Statistical Thinking 1820-1900 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986). 



History of Meteorology 8 (2017)
 

	
  

59 

recognized the importance of the statisticians for the future of meteorology. In the conclusion, I 
suggest that even Quetelet, one of the few men in Europe who could speak with authority on both 
scientific bureaucracy and probability models, had little idea how important the combined work 
was for the meteorology of the future. Even his triumphant Histoire des sciences mathématique et 
physique chez les belges could not have predicted the eventual outcome: that his adopted 
hometown of Brussels would become one of the principal locations for the work of something 
called climate science. 

 

Waiting for the observatory: the methodological lessons of the Brussels city registry 

 

Though simple geography might suggest that Belgium would emerge as a central location for 
European science, Quetelet’s initial plans to create an international standard for global 
measurements – a plan necessary to modern meteorology and climate science – began at the 
margins. Though the nearby University of Louvain had been a center of significant research in 
the early modern era, the city of Brussels had been absent for most of the major significant 
scientific developments in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, and Quetelet’s history of his 
region’s numerous struggles since the Middle Ages has largely been confirmed by subsequent 
histories. The pioneering collection The Scientific Revolution in National Context, for example, 
makes almost no mention of Brussels or the Low Countries.24 Neither do histories of the region 
itself spend much time on science.25 Histories of meteorology do often acknowledge Quetelet’s 
contributions, but because he worked prior to the “unified” era of twentieth-century meteorology, 
he is usually relegated to brief pre-histories of one element of meteorological thought, where the 
“organizational transformation” of observational work took place.26 Even when he began to 
secure government support in the 1830s, he was forced to travel to Paris, London, and several 
German states in order to see how observatories worked.27 Though Quetelet had good reason to 
project a limited view of scientific success in order to secure government patronage for his many 
institutional projects, his vision of the Brussels region as a backwater for science is largely 
confirmed by most of his contemporaries and later historians.  

In spite of this history, Quetelet’s own contributions to Belgian meteorology have been 
well established due to the centrality of the Observatoire Royale de Bruxelles, his primary office 
of data collection for much of the 1840s and 1850s. As Fabian Locher has recently shown, 

	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
24 While parts of modern-day Belgium are mentioned, the French-speaking region is largely absent even from Harold 
J. Cook, “The New Philosophy in the Low Countries,” in The Scientific Revolution in National Context, ed. Roy Porter 
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992): 115-149. 
25 E. H. Kossmann, The Low Countries, 1780-1940 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978). The more recent work by Paul 
Arblaster, A History of the Low Countries, 2nd ed. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan Press, 2003) barely mentions 
science beyond Vesuvius. 
26 Nebeker, Calculating, 11-22. 
27 Liliane Wellens-De Donder, “Les Premières Voyages Scientifiques de Quetelet et la Fondation de l’Observatoire 
Royale de Bruxelles,” Bulletin Astronomique de l'Observatoire Royale de Belgique 11 (1996): 95-104. 



History of Meteorology 8 (2017)
 

	
  

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Quetelet’s work after the observatory was finished was concerned almost exclusively with the field 
of physique du globe, especially terrestrial magnetism, meteorology, and other earth sciences that 
fell under the rubric of periodic phenomenon.28 A mid-twentieth century report on Quetelet 
concluded that while the Belgian was best known as an astronomer and statistician (a point which 
remains true today), his “work in meteorology…was certainly superior to his work in mathematics 
and astronomy.”29 Stephen Stigler has also sought to describe Quetelet’s physique sociale as 
something closer to “social meteorology” than social physics, with meteorology simply replacing 
physics or astronomy as the model science.30 And while many recent works that deal with the 
history of the science begin with the meteorological synthesis of the 1950s and 1960s, when the 
data collectors, theorists, and forecasters made “meteorology…a unified, physics-based, and 
highly computational science,” the importance of nineteenth century work has been highlighted in 
“pushing data” into the forefront.31 In what might only be a slight overstatement, one history of 
Quetelet’s meteorological work concludes that “for close to 50 years, Quetelet was the 
personification of climatology and meteorology in Belgium.”32 

While historians are right to emphasize the importance of Brussels and Belgium in the 
instauration of a new era of data collection, less attention has been paid to the particular historical 
circumstance of this region in creating a vision of science as a large-scale collaborative data-
collecting effort.33 In particular it is worth noting that many of the concepts of data collection and 
causation Quetelet developed were done prior to the observatory being built, a time when he was 
forced to make do with social and demographic data. Such a daunting international project – the 
standardization of tables and measurements across nations – in fact had quite humble beginnings. 
Beginning in 1832, after nearly a decade of obstinate government administrators, faulty equipment, 
and the occupation of his office by revolutionaries waving the tri-color, Quetelet had to wait nearly 
a decade to finally occupy his offices at the newly constructed observatory.34 In this section, I show 
why this history matters for Quetelet’s interrelated thinking on data-collection, causation, and his 
methodological approaches to periodic phenomena and global physics. 

	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
28 Fabian Locher, “The Observatory, the Land-Based Ship and the Crusades: Earth Sciences in European Context, 
1830-50,” The British Journal for the History of Science 40, no. 4 (2007): 491-504. 
29 Louis Dufour, “Quelques Considération sur l’Œuvre Météorologique de A. Quetelet,” in Ciel et Terre 64 (1948): 
58-71, 58. 
30 Steven Stigler, “Adolphe Quetelet: Statistician, Scientist, Builder of Intellectual Institutions,”  in Actualité et 
Universalité de la Pensée Scientifique d’Adolphe Quetelet: Actes du Colloque Organisé à l’Occasion du Bicentenaire 
de sa Naissance (Brussels: Académie royale de Belgique, 1997): 47-61. 
31 Nebeker, Calculating, 3. 
32 Gaston R. Demarée, “Adolphe Quetelet (1796 – 1874): Précurseur du Réseau Belge d’Observations 
Climatologiques,” in “Bicentenaire de la Naissance d’Adolphe Quetelet (1796 – 1874) fondateur de l’observatoire de 
Bruxelles,” Bulletin Astronomique de l’Observatoire Royale de Belgique 11 (1996): 41-51, 41. 
33 An exception to this general rule is Theodore M. Porter, “The Mathematics of Society: Variation and Error in 
Quetelet's Statistics,” British Journal for the History of Science 18 (1985): 51-69. Porter specifically locates Quetelet’s 
thinking in the context of the political revolution. 
34 Henri van Boxmeer, “Le rapport d’Adolphe Quetelet sur la Formation d’un Observatoire dans les Provinces 
Méridionales du Royaume des Pays-Bas,” in “Bicentenaire de la Naissance d’Adolphe Quetelet (1796 – 1874) 
Fondateur de l’Observatoire de Bruxelles,” Bulletin Astronomique de l’Observatoire Royale de Belgique 11 (1996): 
107-113. 



History of Meteorology 8 (2017)
 

	
  

61 

When Quetelet began thinking about an observatory in the early 1820s, he was often coy 
in explaining the project to King William I of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands (in which 
the modern country of Belgium existed from 1815 until 1830). Appealing to William’s concerns 
about the legitimacy of his rule, Quetelet initially claimed the institution would aid in helping the 
Catholic Low Countries modernize to the level of their northern neighbors.35 To make this 
argument, he stressed the importance of the dominant positivist science of astronomy, explaining 
to William that a proper account of the fixed order of the stars would lend a similar harmony and 
stability to his reign.36 Yet in his arguments with government ministers, Quetelet encountered 
significant obstacles to a plan for an observatory focused on astronomy. As one minister wrote to 
Quetelet in 1825, citing the costs of such a project: “What great discoveries can one reasonably 
hope to make in astronomy? Can one claim to make a better catalogue of the fixed stars than we 
currently have? For these reasons, I do not know if science would profit much from the erection 
of a great observatory.”37 Quetelet’s response was to claim that while it may be true that astronomy 
promised few new discoveries, the true extent of the possibilities of an observatory could only be 
learned after it was built; the institution would have to precede the scientific justification.38 

Quetelet’s creative explanation proved true in the long run, and he was able to get approval 
for funding the observatory in 1825, but the observatory proved a failure in both its astronomical 
and symbolic functions.39 Not only did the Belgian revolution of 1830 end William’s reign, but 
the largest observatories in Paris, Greenwich, and Königsberg had by this time already started to 
dominate the reigning field of positional astronomy. Yet rather than the hindrance Quetelet 
imagined, the tumultuous era of 1820s and 1830s Belgium proved surprisingly fertile for 
Quetelet’s thinking on statistics and data collection, as construction delays, a lack of financing, 
and the 1830 Belgian revolution meant he had to look elsewhere for data. In fact, rather than 
theorized in the modern confines of a first-rate observatory, Quetelet’s first conclusions about law-
like behavior emerged from the only place where he knew statistics could be found: the birth 
entries in the Brussels city registry.40 Here, Quetelet discovered surprising and revelatory 
connections between the progressions of the seasons and human procreation, the power of 
averages, and the importance of large-scale data, ideas he would later apply to periodic 
phenomena.  

	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
35 The majority-Protestant Netherlands had just incorporated the Catholic provinces of Belgium, which had been part 
of the Hapsburg Netherlands for centuries before being conquered by the French in the Napoleonic Wars. For the full 
story of Belgium’s long history of occupation, see Pirenne and Kossman.   
36 For the best account of Quetelet’s efforts, see A. Collard, “Le Centenaire de la Création de l'Observatoire Royale 
de Bruxelles,” Ciel et terre 42 (1926): 209-23 and M. A. Demoulin, “Adolphe Quetelet, Fondateur de l'Observatoire 
Royale de Belgique,” Bulletin Astronomique de l'Observatoire Royale de Belgique 2 (1935), 1-3. See also Chapter 3 
of Kevin Donnelly, Adolphe Quetelet, Social Physics and the Average Men of Science (Pittsburgh: University of 
Pittsburgh Press, 2016). 
37 Collard, “Le Centenaire,” 215.   
38 Ibid., 216. 
39 Dufour, “Quelques Considérations.” 
40 Adolphe Quetelet, “Mémoire sur les Lois des Naissances et de la Mortalité à Bruxelles,” Nouveaux Mémoires de 
l'Académie 3 (1826): 496n. 



History of Meteorology 8 (2017)
 

	
  

62 

In one notable example from 1826, after just a few tables of data, Quetelet noted that births 
in Brussels were at their highest in February and lowest in July, year after year, and the progression 
between the peaks and troughs were continuous. Not only did this seem to indicate a powerful 
connection between the seasons and human action, but the data could also be made to fit a normal 
sine curve, one as consistent as Fourier’s for heat transfer. Quetelet had met Fourier in Paris three 
years earlier, but Quetelet’s main “discovery” here was to be the rare mathematician and 
astronomer looking over bureaucratic statistics with an eye towards patterns; those usually looking 
at the data were administrators, and those who knew the sinusoid wave were usually engaged in 
other projects. Even more, when he looked at the mortality records in the same registry, they were 
identical, following the same progression from February to July. As he explained in a paper first 
delivered to the Académie Royale, the numbers confirmed that, in Quetelet’s mind, “the laws 
which rule” in nature can be “extended” onto the “human species.”41 While the modern researcher 
might note that this correlation of birth and death rates might rely heavily on the high mortality for 
children after their birth, for Quetelet it was confirmation that the actions of the weather and people 
were tied to each other through natural laws.42 It was a first step in approaching the laws of the 
weather from the perspective of human behavior rather than as a second-order feature of 
astronomical laws. 

Therefore, in disseminating his “Instructions pour l’Observateurs des Phénomènes 
Périodique,” one of the first methodological texts for studying meteorology, Quetelet explained 
why the collection of local data from observatories was necessary for studying a global system: 
the Brussels data had indicated that large-scale data revealed hidden patterns. Because periodic 
phenomena were ultimately based on the Earth’s “annual orbit,” the former method of observing 
these phenomena “individually” was no longer sufficient: observers “had generally neglected to 
study (periodic phenomena) in their entirely, or to search to find the laws of dependence and 
correlation which existed between them.”43 It was a vision of nature that was positivist in its 
determinism but also practically helpful for the director of a small observatory. The “Instructions” 
contained a vision that looked inward and outward, as each piece of data could both explain, and 
be explained by, a global system. Unlike astronomy, where more than a few positional readings 
would be superfluous, periodic phenomena meant collecting data on a larger scale. What was 
needed then was both simple in its articulation yet daunting in practice: “a system of simultaneous 
observations, established on a grand scale.”44 

By this point, Quetelet had created a seeming rationale for the widespread collection of 
meteorological data, but had not yet articulated anything like an autonomous climate. Instead, he 
still envisioned a hierarchical world of astronomical, meteorological, and social data. For example, 
the first lines of “Des Phénomènes Périodiques,” published nearly 30 years after the “Instructions,” 

	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
41 Ibid., 496. 
42 Ibid., 500. 
43 Adolphe Quetelet, “Instructions pour l’observation des Phénomènes Périodiques,” in Bulletin de l’Académie royale 
des sciences, des lettres et des beaux-arts de Belgique 9 (1842): 65-96, 65. 
44 Ibid. 



History of Meteorology 8 (2017)
 

	
  

63 

in fact asserted only the importance of the lessons of astronomy, opening with the claim that “the 
movement of celestial bodies” was the key to understanding all periodic phenomena. In particular, 
it was the sun that stood as the prime mover of nearly all phenomena on earth. As Quetelet wrote 
of the periodic phenomena of daily climate: “this star in effect seems to be their protector and the 
principal agent in their life.”45 In particular this was due to the influence of daylight, which 
Quetelet believed to be “perhaps the most important phenomenon.”46 Finally, he insisted: “One 
can see in astronomy, above all in the observations of the two great heavenly bodies which strike 
our attention, which contain the origins of all which merits occupying us in our studies.”47 
Quetelet’s positivism and faith in astronomy seemed to be set. 

 Yet the lessons Quetelet had learned while collecting social data continued to influence his 
writing on periodic phenomena. While the climate might ultimately depend on the movement of 
the sun, Quetelet cautioned his prospective global observers in the earlier “Instructions” to note 
that there were two classes of periodic phenomena, a distinction he drew from his earlier work in 
statistics: “One pertaining to the physical and natural sciences and “The other which falls under 
the domain of statistics and concerns mankind living in his social state.”48 Such a distinction 
between what we might now call the natural and social sciences might seem bizarre in the context 
of a document meant to train people how to record wind speeds and temperatures, but it is a 
reminder that Quetelet’s work in collecting meteorological data was not simply about conducting 
second-order astronomy. Quetelet in the 1840s was still best known for investigating population 
statistics, and his landmark 1835 work Sur l’homme was exclusively dedicated to this latter 
“domain” of periodic phenomena. Though the wealth of data provided in that two-volume study 
was a minor sensation in England and Germany, Quetelet oddly dubbed social statistics irrelevant 
to his project to study the climate: “Natural periodic phenomena,” he noted, “are in general 
independent of social periodic phenomena.”49 Yet in spite of this assertion, as the next section 
demonstrates, Quetelet did import these concepts into his work on natural phenomena. Though his 
institutional priorities and education in astronomy and mathematics may have led him to distance 
his more professional observatory work from his early dabbling in social data, the lessons from 
the latter continued to endure. 

 

Inverting the Positivist Hierarchy: The Creation of a Global Physics 

 

As seen in the previous section, the particular constraints of Belgian politics and history had forced 
Quetelet to approach meteorology and periodic phenomena from a unique methodological 

	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
45 Adolphe Quetelet, “Des Phénomènes Périodiques en Général,” in Bulletin de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, des 
Lettres et des Beaux-Arts de Belgique 17 (1864): 229-326, 247. 
46 Ibid., 235. 
47 Ibid., 253. 
48 Quetelet, “Instructions,” 68. 
49 Ibid. 



History of Meteorology 8 (2017)
 

	
  

64 

perspective in Europe. Rather than be able to direct a grand observatory, and study simultaneously 
astronomical and meteorological data, Quetelet for a decade mined the available collections of 
Brussels and Belgium population statistics to discover his first laws and theories about large sets 
of data. On the one hand, it was a success, as his (in)famous ideas of the “Average Man,” the 
Quetelet Index (later renamed the Body Mass Index), and social physics were all in place by 1835. 
It was these projects that garnered Quetelet the later title of “father of statistics” and where most 
of his current renown resides. Yet as also seen in the previous section, Quetelet abandoned social 
data as soon as he could, retaining many features of the positivism he had learned in the Napoleonic 
schools of his youth and continued to see astronomy as the highest form of science. In this section, 
therefore, I examine how this apparent paradox manifested itself in the creation of a new project 
called global physics, an early vision of an independent climate that grew out of Quetelet’s work 
in periodic phenomenon and social data. By examining several papers from 1840 to 1870, I 
investigate how, in spite of occasional deterministic rhetoric, Quetelet’s ideas about global physics 
relied as much on theories gleaned from the social data of Brussels as those from astronomical 
theory and observation. In fact, by 1870, it will be seen that Quetelet was explicitly using social 
physics as a guiding metaphor for global physics, upending the position that weather must be 
studied as a function of astronomical laws. 

To see just how interconnected Quetelet’s natural and social data were, it is important to 
note that one of his first statements on what we might call climate – and what he called global 
physics – occurred in a series of letters dedicated to the applicability of probability theory to “the 
moral and political sciences.” Just four years after the “Instructions,” Quetelet stressed the 
importance of periodic phenomena and expressed a powerful vision of a global weather system in 
a letter to Prince Albert entitled “De causes variables périodique.” His topic was the relationship 
between “the march of the seasons” and human actions. Of all the natural phenomena, Quetelet 
noted, “the most remarkable were certainly those which obeyed the laws of periodicity.”50 So 
strong was this law, that “the succession of the seasons and the days” was able to “modify 
simultaneously the entire globe and all the living beings.” This was not merely the grand total of 
singular actions; rather, Quetelet claimed that “periodic phenomena constituted a common life 
outside of the individual life.” This “succession of phenomenon” demonstrated “the most striking 
harmony” and it was only necessary for the eye “to seize it in its entirety” rather than in isolated 
glimpses.51 Here was the early indication of a completely interdependent climate which could 
apply the lessons of astronomical work to all periodic phenomena on earth and one as positivist in 
spirit as the introduction to “Des Phénomènes Périodiques.”  

In spite of the rhetoric of harmony, the letter was concerned far less with what astronomy 
could explain about periodic phenomena than what periodic phenomena could tell mankind about 
itself. The letter was included as part of Quetelet’s Lettres sur la théorie des probabilités aux 

	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
50 Adolphe Quetelet, Lettres à S.A.R. le Duc Régnant de Saxe-Cobourg et Gotha: Sur la Théorie des Probabilités, 
Appliquée aux Sciences Morales et Politiques (Brussels: Hayez, 1846), 203. 
51 Ibid., 205. 



History of Meteorology 8 (2017)
 

	
  

65 

sciences morales et politiques, and Quetelet made sure to point out the relevance of periodic 
phenomena to the intellectual and moral acts of mankind: 

 

It is the singular condition of mankind and its societies that the virtues and vices, 
the disorders of the heart and of intelligence and the political commotions, are 
influenced more or less by the distance from the sun to the equator and the elevation 
of this star above our horizon!52 

 

Here again was a form of climactic determinism that might seem worthy of Montesquieu, yet 
Quetelet’s boldest language betrayed a much subtler form of thinking about the relationship 
between mankind and climate developed elsewhere in his work. Global physics in fact shared 
many of the same qualities as social physics, Quetelet’s science of man developed 15 years earlier. 
The foundation of Quetelet’s science, Sur l’homme, had already emphasized that the actions of 
society could be modified by governments because the actions of human beings could be separated 
into “natural” and “perturbing” causes, which meant that the environment in which people lived 
could be altered to avoid crimes, poverty or even disease.53 Quetelet had been supported in this by 
work in France to link cholera to population density, where public hygienists had shown that 
reducing the number of people living in one house could severely cut the risk of contracting a 
disease.54 Virtues and vices might be influenced by the position of the sun, but the study of 
mankind revealed that man could intervene between himself and the climate, and that societies 
were not fated to a certain kind of politics or morality based on latitude.  

The concept of natural and perturbing causes drawn from physique sociale found their way 
into global physics in several works, but Quetelet discussed them most at length in a little-known 
1853 work on periodic and non-periodic phenomena, where he explained how temperature was 
“determined” by “constant” and “variable” causes, synonyms for the natural and perturbing forces 
he had used earlier.55 As Quetelet noted, if the angle of the sun “alone regulated the temperatures 
of the year, each day,” we would see the same temperature each year on the same date.56 Yet the 
fact that average temperatures changed significantly from year to year required investigation 
beyond the constant cause of the earth’s position relative to the sun and into the “thousands” of 
“perturbing forces” that caused such fluctuations. While such a project to disentangle all of the 
causal links of the weather seemed impossible, Quetelet was buoyed by the ability of probability 
theory in physique sociale to reduce the collective impact of perturbing forces. Quetelet had 

	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
52 Ibid. 
53 Adolphe Quetelet, A Treatise on Man and the Development of his Faculties (Edinburgh, 1842), 6. 
54 Kevin Donnelly, “Social Physics or Social Disease: Villermé, Quetelet and Cholera 1832,” in Royalists, 
Radicals, and les Misérables: France in 1832, ed. Eric Martone (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2013). 
55 Adolphe Quetelet, “Mémoire sur les Variations Périodiques et non Périodiques de la Température,” Mémoires de 
l'Académie royale de Belgique 28 (1853), 1. 
56 Ibid., 5. 



History of Meteorology 8 (2017)
 

	
  

66 

investigated supposedly individual behavior like suicide in the 1830s, where he realized that 
suicide could neither be the result of a social law (natural) nor a simple collection of individual 
acts (perturbing). Similarly, temperature fluctuations and periodic phenomena could be explained 
through a combination of “natural” and “perturbing” causes. 

 

All perturbing causes, which are by themselves neither constant nor periodic when 
considered individually, sometimes act in one sense or another, but their effects 
become fixed over time and disappear in the calculation of the general average.57 

 

Here, Quetelet was able to show that large-scale changes in weather and other natural phenomena 
could not be second-order features of astronomical laws. As with apparently free human acts like 
childbirth and suicide, the arbitrary nature of the weather could be normalized though calculating 
“probable error,” and Quetelet speculated that “one could see that non-periodic variations could 
proceed with remarkable regularity.”58 What this meant in practice was that any investigation of 
global physics meant that hundreds or thousands of additional “causes” must be sought to explain 
regular features like temperature increase or decrease. Quetelet even used the bell curve to explain 
how law-like behavior in the weather could mimic the hidden patterns in human behavior. Global 
physics, one of the first nineteenth-century articulations of something like a worldwide climate, 
could be interrogated using the same tools as social physics. As seen below, Quetelet would expand 
on this idea, eventually making social physics into the model for global physics. 

 The strongest influence of social physics on the articulation of an independent climate 
system can be found in Quetelet’s1861 magnum opus on climate, Sur la Physique du globe, which 
brought together nearly everything he had done in his career. Quetelet began by making his first 
distinction between meteorology and global physics – subjects that had often been interchangeable 
in previous works, but which were not “sufficiently separated” – because they required “different 
methods of observations.” After noting that there are higher and lower parts to the atmosphere, 
Quetelet defined meteorology as “phenomena which occur in the (lower) part (of the atmosphere) 
which is constantly agitated” while physique du globe concerned the “phenomena known to our 
earth and to the higher part of the atmosphere.”59 What this meant in practice is that the messy and 
localized work of recording and predicting the weather could be separated from the more global 
and rigorously law like behavior of global physics, and while the daily records of meteorology 
maintained an importance, it was largely excluded now from global physics.60 

	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
57 Ibid., 6. 
58 Ibid., 9. 
59 Adolphe Quetelet, Sur la Physique du globe (Brussels: Hayez, 1861), 7. 
60 Such a distinction may push back the earliest dates for a “professional climatology” by a few decades. Edwards, for 
example sees 1883 as the year in which “climate could also be understood as purely physical phenomena, independent 
of other ecosystems.” Edwards, A Vast Machine, 63. 



History of Meteorology 8 (2017)
 

	
  

67 

 Given modern categorizations, it might seem odd that Quetelet began Physique du globe 
with temperatures, a subject that had previously belonged to the messier world of meteorology. 
Yet Quetelet had acquired a generation’s worth of temperature data in Brussels since the founding 
of his observatory, and the data seemed to reveal patterns of behavior and regularity that might fit 
more easily under the lofty title of global physics. To begin with, the temperature continued to 
behave in ways that resembled Fourier’s sinusoid waves for heat transfer and the fluctuation of 
births in Brussels. The average temperature difference in Brussels had been largest in January, but 
gradually and uniformly “diminished until August and September.” In fact, “the averages of the 
minimum and maximum of each day, as well as each month, for 25 years” showed similar 
regularity.61 Here, Quetelet displayed his knowledge of probability theory, categorizing deviations 
from the average as “error,” as in a chart which showed that there was more error to be found in 
winter than in summer.  

As transformative as this work was, Quetelet reserved his most remarkable comments for 
two papers published in the last years of his life. In “Loi de périodicité de l’espèce humaine,” 
Quetelet in fact completely inverted the methodology of 30 years prior, arguing that research on 
climate should begin by studying man: “variations in temperature often follow exactly the same 
laws as those found in human height.”62 If this were not enough to install man as the measure (or 
at least the metaphor) for all things, Quetelet had two years earlier written that “it is easy to see at 
the present time that material laws are infinitely more changed by the intervention of man in 
general” than by individuals.63 What exactly Quetelet meant by “material laws” is not exactly clear 
– it is not a common usage in his work – but even so, the comments above would seem to be a 
complete repudiation of the positivistic vision of passive human beings subject to the timeless 
movement and intensity of the sun’s rays. Whereas at first he had been astonished to see that the 
data of the Brussels city registry looked like a sine wave, now he implored his researchers to study 
the weather as if it were as pattern-like as human behavior. Though simple inconsistency and 
muddled thought can never be ruled out, it does seem that the influence of social data – particularly 
that collected in Belgium – influenced Quetelet’s thinking on global physics, and helped his fellow 
researchers envision the weather as a more complex problem than merely second-order astronomy. 
As seen in the next section, however, Quetelet’s own goals in establishing global physics were far 
more provincial than such lofty claims for his ideas might indicate.   

 

 

 

	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
61 Quetelet, Sur la Physique du Globe, 10. 
62 Adolphe Quetelet, “Loi de Périodicité de l’Espèce Humaine,” Bulletin de l’Académie royale des sciences, des lettres 
et des beaux-arts de Belgique 30 (1870): 358-368.  
63 Adolphe Quetelet, Statistique “Progress des travaux statistiques” Bulletin de l’Académie royale des sciences, des 
lettres et des beaux-arts de Belgique 28 (1868): 192-207, 196. 



History of Meteorology 8 (2017)
 

	
  

68 

Brussels revived: bureaucrats and statisticians at the 1853 International Maritime 
Conference and the International Statistical Congress  

 

Though Quetelet’s comments and instructions on how to envision the climate may have 
contributed to re-conceptualizing climate – his articulation of an independent global physics 
occurred at the height of meteorology’s determinism problem – this was never his main concern. 
Rather, global physics offered a way for Quetelet to connect his observatory to the worldwide 
network of scientists in a way that would have been impossible in astronomy. As he had 
consistently argued, the path forwards for national redemption in science was through international 
coordination. Though the route from his early advocacy for an observatory to redeem Belgian 
science had taken many paths, he was always driven by a desire to integrate his home country into 
international institutions. In this section then, I show how Quetelet’s desire to promote Belgian 
science led to a powerful confluence of government administrators and statisticians in his 
hometown of Brussels, resulting in the first agreements on international standardization of 
temperatures, a crucial moment in the history of climate science. It may have been a coincidence 
that Quetelet’s overlapping concerns – institutional bureaucracy and numbers – would combine in 
1853 to such a powerful effect, but it was no accident that both groups came to Brussels. 

In fact, the roots of both conferences went back over a decade. In defending his global 
physics in 1840, as well as justifying his own work at the observatory, Quetelet had offered a fairly 
prophetic vision for the future sciences of climatology and meteorology. He claimed that global 
physics “has become its own world. It will take centuries of observations to elucidate the hundreds 
of phenomena already found within it, to measure with all the required precision, and to discover 
the laws which rule it.”64 In the same report, Quetelet also told government officials that “there is 
perhaps no science which demands association more imperatively than meteorology.”65 Two years 
later, Quetelet repeated the importance of “being in contact with the scientific world in as many 
ways as possible,” in order to “execute a vast research plan” on global physics.66 Here was the 
guiding methodology of global physics – not an idealized positivist vision of how science operated 
but a practical plan to justify the existence of an observatory in a marginal scientific nation.  

Getting the right numbers was not easy, however, and Quetelet expressed just how 
important collaboration would be in his 1842 “Instructions” on periodic phenomena: 

 

The observations demanded are so numerous and so fatiguing and they require the 
collaboration of so many people that it has hardly been possible to find more than 

	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
64 Adolphe Quetelet, “Rapport Décennal des travaux de l’Académie Royale,” Bulletin de l’Académie royale des 
sciences, des lettres et des beaux-arts de Belgique 7 (1840): 271-342, 12. 
65 Ibid., 17. 
66 Adolphe Quetelet, “Rapport sur l’État de l’Académie en 1842,” Bulletin de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, des 
Lettres et des Beaux-arts de Belgique 9 (1842), 5. 



History of Meteorology 8 (2017)
 

	
  

69 

four or five observatories in Europe that can conduct them with a full 
understanding.67 

 

The “Instructions” would help, but more formal coordination of observers would be necessary for 
advancements in periodic phenomena. The answer came a decade later in 1853 in two large 
gatherings held in Brussels: the International Maritime Conference and the first Statistical 
Congress. In the history of meteorology, the Maritime meeting has been noted an as an important, 
if ultimately failed, attempt to create an international system of measurements: it had helped 
establish the United States as a leader in climate science but was quickly overtaken by more mature 
and coordinated international groups.68 Yet contemporary impressions were more sanguine. 
Matthew Maury, the controversial organizer of the conference, had good things to say about the 
receptiveness of the Belgian government (as well as Quetelet, who was named president of the 
conference after Maury declined), and the conference showed that it was possible for state 
governments to assemble for matters other than war or peace. Quetelet later noted that at this time 
“the people are united in sending their representatives for science, as they had in politics.”69 

 The goal of the conference was simple: “to perfect meteorology and global physics and to 
search out the laws which rule these great phenomena.”70 To do this, Maury had hoped to create a 
large system of coordinated temperature measurements. He had initially hoped that they would 
discuss land observations as well as oceanic observations, but reported back home that countries 
had only agreed to use their navies.71 Understanding that the “vast surfaces of the seas” could be 
broken into sections through lines or “meridians” and “parallels,” Maury suggested that the ideal 
would be to place “a fixed observer, charged with collecting observations of hourly temperatures” 
in each “compartment.” Of course, observatories of the sea would be nearly impossible, so Maury 
conceded that “fixed observatories” were not absolutely necessary and could be replaced by 
“floating observatories” supplied by the different navies of the world.72 The coordinated 
observations could give “knowledge of the direction of the wind at different times of the year, the 
currents, the depths of the seas, their temperatures, etc.” Such a program allowed Maury to 
comment that “we gather here in a spectacle which one will vainly hope to find a historical 
precedent.”73 The process of rigorous international collaboration on global physics that Quetelet 
had predicted a decade earlier had begun. 

	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
67 Quetelet, “Instructions,” 55. 
68 James Rodger Fleming, Historical Perspectives on Climate Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 42 
and Treut, “Historical overview,” 100. 
69 Quetelet, “Sur la Météorologie,” 29. 
70 Ibid. 
71 Maury’s comments on the conference can be found in the “Introduction” to Matthew Maury, Explanations and 
Sailing Directions to Accompany the Wind and Current Charts (Harris, 1858): iii-xii. 
72 Quetelet, “Sur la météorologie,” 29. 
73 Ibid., 30. 



History of Meteorology 8 (2017)
 

	
  

70 

 Agreement was one thing, coordination another. Just as Quetelet had provided detailed 
guidance for observing periodic phenomena, the larger aims of the conference were to correct the 
mistakes of observers and impose more rigorous accounts of data collection. After 15 days of 
deliberation, some preliminary steps were agreed upon. Primarily, “instruments must be compared 
and standards recognized in a way that error can be determined with exactitude.” This had not been 
a problem for the loosely connected meteorologists in Europe, but national armed forces had a 
habit of independence, and the conference organizers recognized that mass coordination of data 
and error correction would be a slow process. Therefore, minimum guidelines were set so that 
naval observers would note “the position of the ship, the current, the level of the barometer, the 
temperature of the air and water one time per day; the strength and direction of the wind three 
times per day (4 am, noon, and 8 pm); and the variations of the (magnetic) needle when it can be 
observed.” Even this basic level would “permit in their whole a system of global and oceanic 
observations” which “covered the entire surface of the globe in a vast scientific network which 
will not let any phenomenon of importance pass.”74 Through the Maritime conference, Quetelet 
had helped to spread the idea of a system of vast observations meant to reduce error, reproducing 
his early instructions on periodic phenomena on a grand scale. 

 Aside from Quetelet, however, none of the delegates to the first significant conference on 
meteorology would have been described primarily as savants. In reviewing the list, the eclectic 
group of thinkers and professionals were, like Maury, either “national officers” of their respective 
navies or administrators and institutional directors. The makeup contrasted sharply with the 
delegates to the other large meeting in Brussels in 1853: the Congrès Internationale de Statistique. 
Here, Quetelet noted the opposite: there were no bureaucratic representatives to be found, only 
savants.75 Quetelet had first experienced the importance of conferences while traveling in 
Germany, and after co-founding the Statistical Section of the British Association, promoted the 
idea of an international meeting at the Great Exhibition in London in 1851. In particular, the 
support of Prince Albert – to whom Quetelet had dedicated Physique du globe and composed his 
Lettres sur la probabilités – helped Quetelet organize the 1853 meeting. Quantitative statistics had 
taken off in England, and Quetelet lauded the “rank assigned to statistics in the most advanced 
country in the world” and “the tribute which has been accorded this science.”76 

 The 1853 statistical congress was only the first step in relocating the international statistical 
establishment to Brussels, much of which remains there today. After the Third Statistical 
Conference was held in London, it was agreed that the Belgian Commission Central de Statistique 
(CCS) “would be invited…to receive and to coordinate the documents which will be sent by the 
different parties of Europe.” The director of the CCS, Xavier Heuschling, noted that the first 
congress in Brussels essentially served to unify international statistics, and that “the sciences of 

	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
74 Ibid., 32. 
75 Adolphe Quetelet, Congrès International de Statistique (Brussels: Hayez, 1873), 3-5. 
76 Adolphe Quetelet, “ “Sur la statistique générale des différents pays,” Bulletin de l’Académie Royale de Belgique 8 
(1841), 14. 



History of Meteorology 8 (2017)
 

	
  

71 

observation only form themselves slowly.”77 Probability and statistics at this point still bore the 
mark of their lowly origins in the sciences of man, and despite the conference participants like 
Whewell, Farr, Herschel, Babbage, and Quetelet, the conference said little about the natural 
sciences, instead creating three sections: 1) General Statistics, which covered basic population 
figures, mortality, etc.; 2) Production and Consumption; and, much to Quetelet’s delight, 3) 
Intellectual and Moral statistics. Quetelet’s vision of a science of man based on rigorous 
observation and quantification was taking place, even if that level had yet to be attained in 
meteorology.  

In contrast to the struggles of the International Maritime Conference, the statistics meeting 
was a tremendous success. Russia pledged full support from the “imperial government,” while 
savants from across the continent chimed in about the possibility of statistics joined with 
governmental support. It was noted that “men of science” were equal to those of “a different title: 
administrative statisticians.” A Professor Ackersdyk of Utrecht remarked that “the people who 
occupy themselves with statistics are not ordinarily specialists in a particular branch, but rather 
embrace science in its entirely.” M. Denziger, Professor of Statistics in Würzburg, agreed that the 
“grandiose” interdisciplinary conference represented “the spirit of our age” because “we attend 
still to something more than statistics.” Nothing would be possible without “national bureaus of 
statistics” Denziger admitted, and the head of the statistical commission in Lyon claimed he was 
“very convinced that we can only have good statistics with the support of the agents of 
governments.”78 In a capstone to the meeting, which must have pleased Quetelet, a professor from 
the University of Göttingen identified the model country for the intermingling of government and 
statistics: “Belgium has so left other countries in the distance in matters of official statistics that it 
is with complete reason that the initiative for the beginning of the general interest in statistics was 
taken by this country.”79 He hoped the “revolutions of this congress” would give a “powerful 
impulse” to future meetings of the world’s scientists, a hope that has been more than met in the 
past 150 years. 

In comparing the attendees and the meeting records, the dual 1853 conferences reveal 
several surprising aspects of early meteorological and climatic research. The Maritime Conference, 
ostensibly organized to discuss a science that had been perceived as just one step removed from 
astronomy, attracted few scientists, was discussed largely at the level of bureaucracy, and led to 
almost nothing besides an agreement to meet more often. The Statistical Congress, however, 
including the once-controversial idea of intellectual and moral statistics, held the attention of some 
of the greatest scientific minds of nineteenth-century Europe, and developed a far more organized 
and significant plan of international organization. The use of probability, essential to modern 
modeling techniques of climate science today, also took form in the series of conferences based 
on the Brussels meeting and helped the young science of quantitative statistics overtake qualitative 

	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
77 Xavier Heuschling, “Congrès internationaux de Statistique, Rapport sur la Belgique, 1855-1867,” Bulletin de la 
Commission Centrale de Statistique 11 (1868), 3. 
78 Ibid., 7-10. 
79 Ibid., 12. 



History of Meteorology 8 (2017)
 

	
  

72 

statistics as the preferred path for the social sciences. To conclude from this limited though 
instructive confluence of ideas, the great hopes for a meteorology derived from astronomical 
methodology and theory had been overshadowed by the methods for a quantitative science of man 
that only twenty years earlier had not even existed. The very statistical concepts Quetelet had 
sketched out in Brussels in the 1820s and 1830s, ideas he likely never would have developed had 
he been given a first-rate observatory, turned out to be the most enduring. In helping organize the 
two foundational conferences in meteorology and statistics in Brussels, Quetelet demonstrated that 
government support for international collaboration of scientific data was essential and that his own 
country had a prominent role to play. Not only had his work in global physics helped to define a 
new field of research, but he had redeemed the scientific reputation of his country as well. 

 

Conclusion 

 

The dual conferences and the resulting international collaboration may best explain Quetelet’s 
decision to link the history of the Belgian people to the statistics of periodic phenomena described 
in the introduction to this paper. The decision to focus on these observations at the exclusion of 
the great positivistic sciences of astronomy, physics or chemistry had indeed brought Brussels 
back into the center of European scientific life. What Quetelet may not have realized, however, is 
that his home region may have in fact benefited because of its many struggles. The revolution and 
construction delays in creating the observatory had led him to the Brussels city registry for data, 
where he first started formulating the statistical “laws” that would lead to international 
prominence. The superfluous nature of his observatory in astronomy also meant that Quetelet had 
to look elsewhere for data, which first tied him into the international meteorological networks. 
Finally, the always perilous state of Belgian and Bruxellois political stability led him to link his 
country’s fortune to others through science, which resulted in two major conferences taking place 
in the same year in his adopted hometown. And throughout it all, Quetelet’s many ambitious and 
fledgling efforts to collect data led to seeing climate as independent, the near opposite of the goal 
he had initially set out to accomplish. 

Quetelet’s program to separate a global climate from the messy business of daily 
meteorology and the methodological imperatives of astronomy, as well as his borrowings from an 
inchoate science of man sketched out hastily with data from the Brussels data registry, might seem 
notable. But it might also be argued that this work was as a historical curiosity, one rightfully 
bracketed out from traditional histories of meteorology. Yet Quetelet was far from being isolated 
from other Europeans studying climate, and his impressive number of contacts and simple 
geographic location made him among the most connected men of science of the nineteenth century. 
Quetelet had spent decades at the head of the observatory, edited the continental publication 
Correspondance mathématique et physique, was Secrétaire Perpetual of the Académie Royale de 
Belgique, and was a member of hundreds of international organizations. Such a wide-ranging 
project to study climate was of course not the result of a single individual, but Quetelet’s plan to 



History of Meteorology 8 (2017)
 

	
  

73 

submit meteorological and statistical data to the judgement of international bodies is indicative of 
the kind of science often practiced in Belgium, one that took on profound consequences in the 
larger metropoles of European science and polity.80 Quetelet’s work in creating international 
statistics – driven largely by the meteorological data from the Brussels Observatory – has been 
noted as being “attentive to the spirit of the age,” and Eric Brian has linked the “invention” of 
“international science” to the desires for stability in Europe.81 Brian has further highlighted the 
importance of Belgian statesman like Quetelet and Xavier Heuschling in the foundation of 
administrative statistics, noting that the international conferences of the kind began in Brussels 
may have been more formative for the discipline than the technical and mathematical work done 
by Galton and others.82 

Whatever the weight of his contributions, Quetelet’s work is a reminder that the 
formulation of the idea of a global climate was not simply an application of higher-order scientific 
methodologies to a new field of research, nor was it a simple cumulative process of collection and 
evaluation of data; rather, it occurred in part because of the practice of overturning long-held 
methodological imperatives through the importation of new analytical tools developed to make 
sense of administrative data. It was not always the intellectual challenges of understanding a 
climate system or the unimpeachable impress of nature that caused Quetelet to look towards the 
first international gathering of meteorologists, or to envision a global physics based on social 
physics. Instead, Quetelet developed his ideas of global physics in tandem with his plans for large 
collaborations of scientists to rescue Belgian science, and it would be a mistake to view 
collaborative, global, data-driven science as being a fully-formed idea that was then shared with 
the larger scientific community. Historians of science have long stressed that institutions and ideas 
develop simultaneously, and Quetelet’s work on global physics and his development of the 1853 
meetings are just a few examples of many on how theory can emerge from praxis, though an ironic 
one given how far Brussels was from the center of scientific discourse. That it allowed scientists 
to imagine a new relationship between mankind and the climate in the nineteenth century makes 
the story all the more interesting. 

	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
80 For the importance of the Belgian region and the statistical conferences on internationalism, see Nico Randeraad, 
“The International Statistical Congress (1853-1876): Knowledge Transfers and Their Limits,” European History 
Quarterly 41, no.1 (2011): 50-65, John L. Heilbron, Nicholas Guilhot and Laurent Jeanpierre, “Toward a 
Transnational History of the Social Sciences,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 44, no.2 (2008):146-
60 and Jean-Guy Prévost and Jean-Pierre Beaud, Statistics, Public Debate and the State, 1800-1945: A Social, 
Political and Intellectual History of Numbers (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012), 49-62. 
81 Zoltan Kenessey, “Quetelet and the Beginning of International Statistics,” in Actualité et Universalité de la Pensée 
Scientifique d’Adolphe Quetelet: Actes du Colloque Organisé à l'Occasion du Bicentenaire de sa Naissance (Brussels: 
Académie Royale de Belgique, 1997), 155 and Eric Brian, “Transactions statistiques au XIXe Siècle,” Actes de la 
Recherche en Sciences Sociales, 145 (2002): 34-46, 36. 
82 Eric Brian, “Statistique Administrative et Internationalisme Statistique Pendant la Seconde Motié du XIXe siècle,” 
Histoire & Mesure 4 (1989): 201-224. 


