The Life of Sir William Petty 1623–1687 is a book, written by Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice, and published in 1895.

The Life of Sir William Petty 1623 – 1687: one of the first Fellows of the Royal Society, sometime Secretary to Henry Cromwell, Maker of the 'Down Survey' of Ireland, Author of 'Political Arithmetic' &c. - chiefly derived from private documents hitherto unpublished. .

The next chapters cover the period from 1660 to 1678, in which Petty published much of the works that, centuries later, brought him fame among economists and statisticians.

[3] He was happy to see that a biography on William Petty had appeared: "Finally, more than two hundred years after his death, the most genial of the English political economists of the seventeenth century has found his biographer", writes Cunow in his review in Die Neue Zeit in 1896.

[4] But, does he write subsequently, the (large amount of) work that is done by Fitzmaurice, does not provide a satisfactory result and does not offer a clear image of the character (of Petty).

Cunow also makes some remarks concerning Bevan's Sir William Petty: A Study in English Economic Literature (1894).

[7] He thought that a reader will profit of this book, full of information, and giving abundant means of arriving at a fair estimate of Petty's character, "only in proportion to what he already knows of the period; and even those who have some tolerable acquaintance with the time will find themselves at a loss to explain many of the allusions with which Petty's papers are bestrewn.