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When I turn over the pages of Biometrika, a quarterly journal in which is recorded the work done in the field of biological statistics by Professor Karl Pearson and his colleagues, I am out of my depth at the first line, because mathematics are to me only a concept: I never used a logarithm in my life, and could not undertake to extract the square root of four without misgiving.
Now the man in the street knows nothing of Biometrika: all he knows is that "you can prove anything by figures," though he forgets this the moment figures are used to prove anything he wants to believe.
Much of Professor Pearson's statistical work in this and allied directions, is the elaboration of ideas and suggestions thrown out by Galton. See, e.g., Karl Pearson's Robert Boyle Lecture, "The Scope and Importance to the State of the Science of National Eugenics" . Biometrika, edited by Karl Pearson in association with other workers, contains numerous statistical memoirs on eugenics.
If he did take in Biometrika he would probably become abjectly credulous as to all the conclusions drawn in it from the correlations so learnedly worked out; though the mathematician whose correlations would fill a Newton with admiration may, in collecting and accepting data and drawing conclusions from them, fall into quite crude errors by just such popular oversights as I have been describing.
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