  Published between 1760 and 1770, Bielfeld's writings prove that scholars of
the time were acquainted with the concepts of both political arithmetic and
German statistik, long before they merged into a new discipline at the
beginning the following century. It is argued here that these works may have
been an important source of diffusion of statistical concepts at the end of the
eighteenth century. Bielfeld is now almost completely forgotten, and the
reasons for his lack of fame in posterity are examined.
