l80 ECOLOGY AND LIFE HISTORY OF THE COMMON FROG 



of the largest computors would be suitable, and the cost would be 

 far more than this. Work of this kind cannot be merely handed over 

 to the statistician with the request "to get on with it." Only the 

 biologist can tell him what to look for, and what functions to use, 

 and after computation the processed data would have to come back 

 to the biologist to be digested. The compilation of the meteorological 

 data into a form suitable for the computor staff would be a large 

 operation. It took me many months, for there were nearly thirty 

 thousand entries to make, and each came from a closely printed page, 

 out of which only a few items had to be selected. This work could, 

 of course, be delegated, but someone would have to do it — there is no 

 mechanical way. 



I am inclined to think that a combination of the two methods might 

 be more practical. If the data could be processed, and the results 

 published or made available to interested people, the biologists would 

 be spared the drudgery, but would be free to work in their own way 

 as in the first scheme. 



I suggest that those now in charge of similar schemes of collection 

 of large masses of biological data should not allow the schemes to run 

 on for too long without a statistical review. It is not true that tens of 

 thousands of observations for scores of years are essential for proper 

 conclusions, and great waste of effort can result from the accumu- 

 lation of far more data than is necessary. It should not be forgotten 

 that in statistics, it often happens that the value of the information only 

 increases as the square root of the number of observations. Merely to 

 double the accuracy of some of the results of Chapter 8 would need a 

 century of more observations. I had enough with twenty-four years, 

 and the main outlines were visible after only six. Moreover, the 

 inclusion in the new schemes, of which there are a number, of the 

 same animals and plants as were included in the Royal Meteorological 

 Society's scheme seems to me a waste of effort. The Meteorological 

 Society's data are so voluminous that surely no one can need any 

 more of the same kind. It is computors that are now needed, not 

 observers or compilers. Of course, these comments do not apply to 

 recordings of animals and plants not in the older scheme for this 

 information will be needed in the future. 



As this book was being written, a letter to Nature appeared (Gunn 

 and Symmons, 1959) on the subject of forecasting locust plagues. It 

 bears out some of the remarks in this chapter so well that it seems 



