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Abstract

The institucionalization of Demography as an autonomous and differentiated scientific discipline occurred only at the beginning of nineteenth century, despite the antiquity of the interest in its subjects. Its long delay can be, and has been, attributed to the lack up to those times of satisfactory data and information for the purpose of minimally reliable generalizations. Throughout this paper, an attempt will be made to show the gradative accumulation of knowledge on the dynamics os population which has proceded the advent of Demography as a science, by focusing on the contributions of some of the main exponents of the so-called "protostatistical era".