6 
Editorial 
diagrams and numerical tables wherever it seems possible. In this manner we 
hope that Biometrika will provide material for both branches of science ; that it 
will not only publish valuable biometric and statistical researches, but serve as a 
store-house of unsolved problems for both unemployed biologist and mathematician. 
We trust that bringing these men together may widen the activity of both. 
Many of the problems of biometry can only be approached from the standpoint 
of the cooperative collection of material and reduction of statistics, and in this 
respect we shall strive to form a link between scattered biometric workers. 
Biometrika will ask for aid in cooperative work, and be at all times ready to 
publish requests for aid, and the forms and schedules which our contributors desire 
to be circulated or filled in. In this way it may be hoped that a guild of qualified 
collectors and workers may be gradually formed to whom appeal may be made 
for collecting, counting and observing. There are many men and women with 
the necessary training, scattered about this and other countries, who without 
having the opportunity for initiating original work are not only competent but 
glad to assist with collecting-box, camera or pencil. From such workers the 
Editors will be glad to hear and will endeavour to put them in touch with those 
desiring their aid. 
Extensions, corrections, criticisms of the results published in our pages we shall 
heartily welcome whatever be their source. We expect to receive stalwart blows 
as well as to give them. All we shall demand in this respect is the chivalry which 
is needful in scientific controversy, which while combating error does not dis- 
courage honest endeavour. The most fertile men of science have made blunders, 
and their consciousness of such slips has been retribution enough ; it is only their 
more sterile critics who delight to dwell too often and too long on such mistakes. 
In science, both in symbolic analysis and in our knowledge of Nature, we are very 
ignorant ; we do not pretend that biometry will revolutionise our ideas of life. 
All we claim is that in certain aspects of biological research, biometry is an 
instrument which can aid us effectively in our gropings after truth. Only let the 
spirit in which it is used be that of the master-mind, the ideal so well and faith- 
fully porti'ayed in the form and features on our frontispiece. Ignoramus; in hoc 
signo lahoremus ! 
