Argument

We present, and place in its context, a previously unpublished paper by Nicholas (Nils) Collin, one of the eighteenth-century pioneers of the American Philosophical Society. Collin may have been one of the first to bring eighteenth-century advances in probability theory to the United States at the very time that applied probability was gaining importance in the design of constitutions and in the design of annuities. Specifically, Collin transmitted at least some of the revolutionary social mathematics of Condorcet to the Society and therefore into American intellectual life.