The importance of numbers

Bought the third edition of "Statistics and Data Analysis in Geology" by John C. Davis - a lot of it looks familiar, but it's good to have this on the shelf. I like the good old citation at the beginning from Lord Kelvin -- I have seen it several times before, but it still sounds important:

"...when you can measure what you are speaking about and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely in your thoughts advanced to the state of science, whatever the matter may be."