he acted in 1851 as one of its commissioners at the great industrial exhibition at London, and published an elaborate report on the woollen goods. Three years later he was president of the committee of judges at the similar exhibition at Munich, and the report of its proceedings was drawn up by him. In 1855 he became councillor of state, the highest honour in the service. From 1835 to 1847 he contributed a long series of reviews, mainly of works on economical subjects, to the Münchener gelehrte Anzeigen and also wrote for Rau's Archiv der politischen Ökonomie and the Augsburger allgemeine Zeitung. As head of the bureau of statistics he published a series of valuable annual reports (Beiträge zur Statistik des Königreichs Bayern, Hefte 1-17, 1850–1867). In later years, this work was regarded as distinguishing him as a pioneer in the field of statistics. He was engaged at the time of his death, on 23 November 1868, upon a second edition of his Staatswirthschaftliche Untersuchungen, which was published in 1870. Staatswirthschaftliche Untersuchungen The Staatswirthschaftliche Untersuchungen (“Investigations in Political Economy”; 1832, 2nd ed. 1870), although not a systematic treatise on political economy, has been regarded by some as the most important contribution to political economy since the Wealth of Nations in many aspects. It cannot, indeed, be said to contain principles which are in themselves novel or original; Hermann's merits are not so much those of a discoverer as of a most acute and subtle critic. Like David Ricardo he excels in abstract analysis, in resolution of complex phenomena into their simpler elements, but he has a more firm hold than Ricardo ever seems to have possessed of the true nature of these elementary facts, and a remarkable power of precisely stating and comprehensively combining them. The peculiar value of the Untersuchungen consists in the strict analysis to which the primary notions of economics are subjected, in the general conception of the method and plan of the science which emerges from this analysis, and in the way in which fundamental principles are carried out in the detailed problems of the science. Some thought Hermann's approach allowed the clear rendering of the position of a pure theory of economic facts as an indispensable and independent branch of social science, as opposed to the historic method of inquiry, which was seen as fatal to much that was regarded as distinctive of the abstract