Quesnay and some of his followers; he paid a high tribute to their scientific services in his Wealth of Nations. Quesnay died on the 16th of December 1774, having lived long enough to see his great pupil, Turgot, in office as minister of finance. He had married in 1718, and had a son and a daughter; his grandson by the former was a member of the first Legislative Assembly.
The publications in which Quesnay expounded his system were the following:—two articles, on “Fermiers" and on “Grains,” in the Encyclopédie of Diderot and D'Alembert (1756, 1757); a discourse on the law of nature in the Physiocratie of Dupont de Nemours (1768); Maximes générales de gouvernement économique d'un royaume agricole (1758), and the simultaneously published Tableau économique avec son explication, ou extrait des économies royales de Sully (with the celebrated motto, “Pauvres paysans, pauvre royaume; pauvre royaume, pauvre roi”); Dialogue sur le commerce et les travaux des artisans; and other minor pieces. The Tableau économique, though on account of its dryness and abstract form it met with little general favour, may be considered the principal manifesto of the school. It was regarded by the followers of Quesnay as entitled to a place amongst the foremost products of human wisdom, and is named by the elder Mirabeau, in a passage quoted by Adam Smith, as one of the three great inventions which have contributed most to the stability of political societies, the other two being those of writing and of money. Its object was to exhibit by means of certain formulas the way in which the products of agriculture, which is the only source of wealth, would in a state of perfect liberty be distributed among the several classes of the community (namely, the productive classes of the proprietors and cultivators of land, and the unproductive class composed of manufacturers and merchants), and to represent by other formulas the modes of distribution which take place under systems of Governmental restraint and regulation, with the evil results arising to the whole society from different degrees of such violations of the natural order. It follows from Quesnay's theoretic views that the one thing deserving the solicitude of the practical economist and the statesman is the increase of the net product; and he infers also what Smith afterwards affirmed, on not quite the same ground, that the interest of the landowner is “strictly and indissolubly connected with the general interest of the society.” A small édition de luxe of this work, with other pieces, was printed in 1758 in the palace of Versailles under the king's immediate supervision, some of the sheets, it is said, having been pulled by the royal hand. Already in 1767 the book had disappeared from circulation, and no copy of it is now procurable; but the substance of it has been preserved in the Ami des hommes of Mirabeau, and the Physiocratie of Dupont de Nemours.
His economic writings are collected in the 2nd vol. of the Principaux économistes, published by Guillaumin, Paris, with preface and notes by Eugène Daire; also his Œuvres économiques et philosophiques were collected with an introduction and note by Aug. Oncken (Frankfort, 1888); a facsimile reprint of the Tableau économique, from the original MS., was published by the British Economic Association (London, 1895). His other writings were the article “Evidence” in the Encyclopédie, and Recherches sur l'évidence des verités géométriques, with a Projet de nouveaux éléments de géométrie, 1773. Quesnay's Éloge was pronounced in the Academy of Sciences by Grandjean de Fouchy (see the Recueil of that Academy, 1774, p. 134). See also F. J. Marmontel, Mémoires; Mémoires de Mme. du Hausset; H. Higgs, The Physiocrats (London, 1897).
QUESNEL, PASQUIER (1634-1719), French Jansenist theologian, was born in Paris on the 14th of July 1634, and, after graduating in the Sorbonne with distinction in 1653, joined the French Oratory in 1657. There he soon became prominent; but his Jansenist sympathies led to his banishment from Paris in 1681. He took refuge with the friendly Cardinal Coislin, bishop of Orléans; four years later, however, foreseeing that a fresh storm of persecution was about to burst, he fled to Brussels, and took up his abode with Antoine Arnauld (q.v.). There he remained till 1703, when he was arrested by order of the archbishop of Malines. After three months' imprisonment he made a highly dramatic escape, and settled at Amsterdam, where he spent the remainder of his life. After Arnauld's death in 1694 Quesnel was generally regarded as the leader of the Jansenist party; and his Réflexions morales sur le Nouveau Testament played almost as large a part in its literature as Jansen's Augustinus itself. As its title betokens, this was a devotional commentary on the Scriptures, wherein Quesnel managed to explain the aims and ideals of the Jansenist party better than any earlier writer had done; and it accordingly became the chief object of Jesuit attack. It appeared in many forms and under various titles, the original germ going back so far as 1668; the first complete edition was published in 1692. The bull Unigenitus, in which no fewer than 101 sentences from the Réflexions morales were condemned as heretical, was obtained from Clement IX. on the 8th of September 1713. Quesnel died at Amsterdam on the 2nd of December 1719.
See also Mme. Albert Le Roy, Un Janseniste en exil (Paris, 1900; and Maulvault, Répertoire de Port Royal (Paris, 1905).
QUETELET, LAMBERT ADOLPHE JACQUES (1796-1874), Belgian astronomer, meteorologist and statistician, was born at Ghent on the 22nd of February 1796, and educated at the lyceum of that town. In 1819 he was appointed professor of mathematics at the athenaeum of Brussels; in 1828 he became lecturer at the newly created museum of science and literature, and he continued to hold that post until the museum was absorbed in the free university in 1834. In 1828 he was appointed director of the new royal observatory which it had been decided to found, chiefly at his instigation. The building was finished in 1832, and the instruments were ready for work in 1835, from which date the observations were published in 4to volumes (Annales de l'Observatoire Royal de Bruxelles), but Quetelet chiefly devoted himself to meteorology and statistics. From 1834 he was perpetual secretary of the Brussels Academy, and published a vast number of articles in its Bulletin, as also in his journal, Correspondence mathématique et physique (11 vols., 1825-39). He died at Brussels on the 17th of February 1874. His son, Ernest Quetelet (1825-78), was from 1856 attached to the observatory, and on his death succeeded him as director. He made a great number of observations of stars with proper motion.
Quetelet's astronomical papers refer chiefly to shooting stars and similar phenomena. He organised extensive magnetical and meteorological observations, and in 1839 he started regular observations of the periodical phenomena of vegetation, especially the flowering of plants. The results are given in various memoirs published by the Brussels Academy, and in his works Sur le climat de la Belgique and Sur la physique du globe (the latter forms vol. xiii. of the Annales, 1861). He is, however, chiefly known by the statistical investigations which occupied him from 1823 onward. In 1835 he published his principal work, Sur l'hornme et le développement de ses facultés, ou essai de physique sociale (2nd ed., 1869), containing a résumé of his statistical researches on the development of the physical and intellectual qualities of man, and on the “average man” both physically and intellectually considered. In 1846 he brought out his Lettres à S. A. R. le duc régnant de Saxe-Coburg et Gotha sur la théorie des probabilités appliquée aux sciences morales et politiques (of which Sir J. Herschel wrote a full account in the Edinburgh Review), and in 1848 Du système social et des lois qui le régissent. In these works he shows how the numbers representing the individual qualities of man are grouped round the numbers referring to the “average man” in a manner exactly corresponding to that in which single results of observation are grouped round the mean result, so that the principles of the theory of probabilities may be applied to statistical researches on the subjects. These ideas are further developed in various papers in the Bulletin and in his L'Anthropométrie, ou mesure des différentes facultés de l'homme (1871), in which he lays great stress on the universal applicability of the binomial law,—according to which the number of cases in which, for instance, a certain height occurs among a large number of individuals is represented by an ordinate of a curve the binomial) symmetrically situated with regard to the ordinate representing the mean result (average height). A detailed Essai sur la 'vie et les travaux de L. A. J. Quetelet, by his pupil and assistant E. Mailly, was published at Brussels in 1875.
QUETTA, the capital of British Baluchistan, India, which also gives its name to a district. It rose to prominence in 1876, when Sir Robert Sandeman founded a residency there. The name is a variation of the word kwat-kot, signifying a fortress, and the place is still locally known as Shal Kot. Quetta is the southernmost point in the line of frontier posts and system of strategic railways on the north-west frontier of India, 536 m. by rail N. of Karachi. It forms the headquarters of the fourth division of the southern army, with a strong garrison of all arms. The railway was built in 1879, with a view to its continuance to Kandahar; but its present terminus is New Chaman on the Afghan border. A branch line to Nushki was completed in 1905. The cantonment and
