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A number of studies that nowadays would be called bibliometric and scientometric and that were performed before the very terms «bibliometrics» and «scientometrics» had been coined are considered. It is shown that researchers who performed such studies from the XVIII to the first half of the XX century did not see any difference between the assessment of documentary flows in order to obtain the characteristics of science and in order to improve the document availability in libraries, and often they carried out both types of assessment simultaneously within the same study. This historical view on the problem of «metricses» indirectly confirms the methodological fruitfulness of not searching for differences between various «metricses», but of getting them together around bibliometrics, and of searching for fundamentally common features of «metricses».