Among the most basic tools of elementary statistics, percentages, averages and statistical tables readily come to mind. Taught nowadays very early on in the academic curriculum, all three entail only an elementary degree of formalization. Percentages and averages suggest comparison among phenomena or across time, while tables, by classifying and summarizing data, allow for the formulation of hypotheses. The history of these heuristic tools is scarcely known, at least from the mathematical point of view, and the history of their practical use remains for its part embryonic. French demographer Hervé Le Bras, the author of a historical monograph on mortality as an intellectual construct and an object of statistical inquiry, gives 1662 as a birth year for ‘the first statistical tables’, while historian Jean-Claude Perrot traces the invention of two-way tables to ‘bookkeeping techniques already in use during the sixteenth century’. As regards the average, seventeenth-century political arithmeticians made large use of it, often under the simple guise of the ‘medium’ (that is, the ‘centre’ of a distribution). It has also been documented that mathematical thinking about means and averages had taken shape by the end of the seventeenth century with the work of Jacques Bernoulli and developed throughout the eighteenth century. Yet, only during the nineteenth century did means and averages become a central feature of statistics, up to a point where statistics of that era has been described as ‘amounting somehow to a theory of means’.