ON THE PHYSIQUE AND ABILITY OF OFFSPRING 23 



apparently know. This is not science, it is the plausible 

 verbalism which renders so much of economics barren. 

 Mr. Keynes scolds Miss Elderton for spending her time 

 in reducing other persons' data instead of improving the 

 ' original material '. I do not know whether he has ever 

 organized the survey of a thousand homes, and knows the 

 years of work and labour it involves, especially when it 

 has to be done by aid of volunteer workers, and no special 

 funds directed to this end. In the Galton Eugenics 

 Laboratory we do know something of the difficulties 

 involved. We value equally the social inquirers who 

 join us, and whose duties lie in collecting material, and the 

 trained statisticians whose duties lie in the reduction of 

 data. We are not likely, however, to put one to the task 

 for which the other has been trained, nor suppose that 

 a few weeks' computation can be profitably exchanged 

 for the like time spent in collecting original material. 

 Nor, again, are we in the least likely to give up modern 

 methods of statistics because a critic, who, as far as I am 

 aware, has given no public illustration of his power of 

 handling them, tells us that they are unnecessary and labour 

 wasted. We believe that the attempt to show in a definite 

 quantitative manner the extent of association between 

 all forms of environment and character can never be 

 wasted labour, and the partial correlation coefficients 

 which exhibit the relation between drink in the parent 

 and character in the child for constant age of child cannot 

 be replaced by mere tables or diagrams unless the numbers 

 be ten times as large as those generally available. Not 

 even a Cambridge economist could safely read out of the 

 mere tables the result conveyed by Miss Elderton on p. 7, 

 that, having regard to the probable error of the results, 

 and allowing for the age of the child, there was a very 



