21 - WILHELM LEXIS

Summary

We much regret to announce the death of Professor Wilhelm Lexis, news of which has come to hand from Göttingen. Born in Eschweiler, near Aachen, on 17 July 1837, Lexis matriculated at the University of Bonn in 1855, where he read mathematics and natural science. For a few years he was an assistant master at the Gymnasium in Bonn. In 1861 he proceeded to Paris, where he devoted himself to the study of French economic conditions and soon became known as an authority on economic questions. In 1872 he was appointed to the Chair of Political Economy at Strassburg. Two years later he moved to Dorpat, and thence, in 1876, to Freiburg in Breisgau. He was called to Breslau in 1884, and finally settled in 1887 in Göttingen, where he continued to teach for a quarter of a century.

Lexis's work in economics is primarily associated with the celebrated Handwörterbuch der Staatswissenschaften, in the editing of which he was one of Professor Conrad's colleagues (as also in the editing of the Jahrbücher). In this great compilation he was responsible for much of the work on currency and monetary questions generally, and on public finance. Up to the end of his life he continued to contribute articles to the Jahrbücher on the progress of monetary science and practice.

Perhaps Lexis's most original contributions to knowledge, however, are to be found in his statistical investigations into problems of population and sex-ratio, and in the pure statistical theory which these investigations led him to develop.