14 



NATURAL HISTORY, STATISTICS, AND 

 APPLIED MATHEMATICS 



Edgar Anderson 



One February afternoon about twenty years ago, I was conducting a field 

 trip in Natural History for a class of intelligent amateurs varying widely in 

 age, social status, and scientific sophistication. One had his master's degree 

 in botany and was then a manufacturer dealing with polymerized molecules. 

 Another, a wholesale grocer of much native intelligence, had had no formal 

 education since the time he left high school to help support his widowed 

 mother. There were two high-school biology teachers, a bored investment 

 banker, and the gracious, gray-haired president of the city's most exclusive 

 garden club. Conducting such a class through the winter woods is a real 

 challenge. Problems must be put on such a fundamental level that the most 

 advanced students will be bored, yet in such simple terms that the beginners 

 are not overwhelmed. 



Finally, I hit upon an exercise so effective that I used it year after year, 

 first with these night-school classes and then with college students. Even- 

 tually I exposed graduate students to it with such uniformly excellent re- 

 sults that now I use it in discussions with fellow scholars: biologists, mathema- 

 ticians, social scientists. 



On that February afternoon I selected a big white oak tree and, leaning 

 against it, addressed the class somewhat as follows: "It is just over a hundred 

 years since this hillside was first taken title to by pioneers from Virginia. In 

 that time many things have happened on this site. There are certainly hun- 

 dreds of ways you can find your way to analyzing the main factors in what 

 has taken place here. There is one very easy way, that I know of for certain. 

 It is probably not the only easy one, but most of the other methods are dif- 

 ficult and indirect and time-consuming. Now your assignment for the next 

 hour is to find what were the main steps in vegetational change on this site 

 in the last century. You can all solve the problem with no more technical 



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