Sfatuitical Investigations 357 



C. GALTON'S ANTHROPOMETRIC LAHORATORIEH 



The above series of schedules will show how fertile were Gallon's plans 

 for collecting statistical data during the decade 1874-84. It was, however, 

 oidy in the course of this schedule experience that he learnt how reluctant 

 most people are to till up a schedule. As a result of this experience Galton 

 changed his nietho<l of action. Failing the establishment of school anthro- 

 pometric laboratories Galton determined to set one up at his own cost, 

 and catch the world when on its leisurely and inquisitive peregrinations. 

 He called into existence the fii'st Anthropometric Laboratory at the Inter- 

 national Health Exhibition in London, 1884. On the closing of this exhibition 

 the laboratory was removed to the Science Museum, South Kensington, and 

 the total number of visitors measured before it was closed w;is well over 9000. 

 These included both sexes and all ages from five to eighty years. This 

 splendid material, which is only at the present time being fully reduced and 

 utilised', together with Gallon's "Family Records" embracing between three 

 and four hundred families, some 150 'stirps,' provided him at last with the 

 material he had so long sought. The discussion of this material furnished 

 Galton with occupation for at least ten years; and the need for novel 

 statistical methods, which its problems demanded, led him to the correlational 

 calculus, the Jons et origo of that far-reaching ramification — the modern 

 mathematical theory of statistics. One quakes to think of what might have 

 happened luid Galton not obtained through that tirst anthropometric 

 laboratory and his family records the data he needed! The latter led him at 

 once to the quantitative measure of heredity — the correlation of kinsmen 

 for any faculty — and the former showed him that the same problems repeat 

 themselves in all statistical material, and that the conception of correlation 

 is not peculiar to heredity, but embraces all recordable qualities which without 

 being causiilly linked together yet vary more or less stringently one with the 

 other. From that conception arose a new view of the univeree, both organic and 

 inorganic, which provides all branches of science with a novum organum, far 

 wider-reaching in its effects than that of Bticon, and as characteristic of the 

 last quarter of the nineteenth century tus the fluxional calculus was of that of 

 the seventeenth. I have sought in vain for any forerunner of Galton in this 

 matter^ and feel convinced that he was the fii'st to grasp not only the need 

 of measuring associated variations, but the first to provide any real measure 

 of them. Galton wrote to Darwin on December 24, 1869 that the appearance 

 of the Origin of Species had formed a real crisis in his life and freed him 

 from his old superstition as If he hiul been roused from a nightmare (see 

 Vol. 1, Plate II). For some of us Gallon's new calculus acted in precisely 

 the same manner; it enabled us to reach real knowledge — "to submit phe- 

 nomena to mej\suremeut and number" — in many branches of inquiry where 



" Se« for example Koga and Morant, "On the Degree of Association between Reaction Times 

 in the case of DiBerent Senses," Diometrika, Vol. xv, pp. 346-72, 1923. 



' See a paper by the present writer entitled " Notes on the History of Correlation," Bio- 

 metriJca, Vol. xiii, pp. 25-45, 1920. 



