Our references to the pioneering work of Quetelet were meant to point out that
the early users of means did not regard them simply as ways to describe centers of
distributions, which is how some today (misleadingly) characterize them. Recent
histories of the development of statistics (Hacking, 1990; Porter, 1986; Stigler,
1986) portray the early innovators of statistics as struggling from the beginning with
issues of interpretation. In this regard, Quetelet’s idea of the “average man” was a
way to take the interpretation of a mean as a “true value” of repeated measures and
bootstrap it to a new domain—measurements of individuals—for which the mean