BIOMETRIC IDEAS AND METHODS 45 



very generally misunderstood the significance 

 and possibilities of biometric methods as applied 

 to their subject. At the outstart the enthusiasm 

 of the biometric workers led to great expectations 

 as to what the new science was going to accom- 

 plish. Because these expectations were in large 

 degree based on an entire misconception of what 

 mathematical methods could by any possibility do, 

 they were not fulfilled, and this naturally led to 

 more or less of a feeling of aversion to the whole 

 subject. Such a result would have been inevitable 

 whatever the quality of the biometric research 

 done. 



In the second place, biometry was, for some 

 time, taken to be a school of biological philoso- 

 phy rather than what it really is, a method 

 of research. The great activity of biologists 

 during recent years in the analytical study of 

 inheritance by the method of experimental breed- 

 ing has served to establish on a firm basis certain 

 fundamental principles of the physiology of the 

 hereditary process (the principles of segregation, 

 and of the normal stability of homozygous strains) . 

 It is further the fact that certain views regarding 

 the method of evolution and of inheritance in 

 plants and animals which have been upheld by 

 certain leading biometrical authorities are, in 

 regard to some fundamental points, utterly at vari- 

 ance with the results of these experimental investi- 

 gations. By a regrettable confusion of thought, 



