He was descended from John Jarvis, a shipbuilder who emigrated from
Yorkshire,
England, to
Boston in 1661. He attended public school in Concord, and
Westford Academy. He graduated from
Harvard in 1826. In 1827 he taught school in Concord, also studying with
Josiah Bartlett. Jarvis made a sanitary survey of
Massachusetts, by order of the government, and published a report (1855), and subsequently, by appointment of the
United States Secretary of the Interior, he tabulated the mortality statistics of the United States as reported in the census of 1860, his work constituting one half of the fourth volume of the reports of the
eighth census. He was a member of numerous learned societies, and was president of the
American Statistical Association from 1852 until his death. In 1863, he was elected as a member to the American Philosophical Society. Additionally, Jarvis wrote a large number of reports on public health, mortality rates, education, insanity, and other subjects. In his 1871 essay entitled
Relation of Education to Insanity, Jarvis argued that too much education was directly linked to increased rates of insanity. ==Works==