Essai sur les monnoies,

An excellent example.

Nicolas-François Dupré de Saint-Maur (1695-1774) was a French economist and statistician. In this, his major work, he provides a treatment of European coinage and the relationship between the price of wheat, wine, oil, meat, wood and other commodities, and salaries paid from 1002 to 1742. He also tries to demonstrate that food prices have increased twelve-fold since AD 1 and to introduce John Locke's ideas to France - one of the first writers to do so.

Adam Smith praised Dupré de Saint-Maur's food-price statistics in his Wealth of Nations, while Buffon relied on his mortality statistics in his Histoire naturelle de l'homme.