"DAS FEHLEKGESETZ UND SEINE VERALLGEMEINER- 
UNGEN DURCH FECHNER UND PEARSON"." A 
REJOINDER. 
By KARL PEARSON, F.R.S. 
There is not much profit as a rule in complaining of the treatment one 
receives at the hands of critics, but still I think the needlessly hostile tone of 
Dr K. E. Ranke and Dr Greiner's review of my memoir on skew variation requires 
some protest on my part. As an illustration of the want of courtesy of which 
I complain I would cite for example the following statement (p. 323) : 
Er (Pearson) weist aber einmal darauf hiii, datss zwar seine eingeschriebenen Kurven 
teilweise unbegrenzt werden konnen, das Gesetz selbst, die hypergeometrische Reihe aber 
nicht, und vertrostet auf eine spiitere Arbeit, in der an Stelle der eingeschi-iebenen Kurven die 
Anpassung der Reihen selbst gegeben werden solle. Diese spiitere Arbeit ist nie geschrieben 
worden. 
This is not an isolated instance of the manner in which the authors criticise 
my work. It was quite open to them to have examined the customary sources 
of bibliographical information, or even to have written to me and asked if the 
memoir in question had been published. But here as elsewhere they assumed, 
without making proper investigation, that I could say nothing further and 
therefore had said nothing further. The memoir in question appeared so long 
ago as 1899 in a well known British scientific journal from which the authors 
actually cite another paper of mine. Although my memoir is nie geschrieben 
* The criticism of my work appeared in the An hiv fiir Anthropologic, Bd. ii. pp. 295 — 331, 1904. 
The proper place to reply to an attack of the kind would be in the Archiv itself. Professor J. Eanke 
accepted a rejoinder and asked that it should be in German and not exceed 40 pp. I have heartily 
to thank Miss M. Lewenz for the labour of a translation, which I much regret I cannot make use of, 
because the Editors of the Archiv do not now see tit to publish this reply to K. E. Ranke's attack. As 
the reply was an endeavour to give an historico-critical account of the theory of skew variation it may 
interest readers ol Biometrika, and will possibly reach in the course of time some readers of the Archiv 
fiir Anthropologic. 
t "On certain Properties of the Hypergeometrical Series, and on the fitting of such series to 
Observation Polygons in the Theory of Chance," Phil. Mag. 1899. 
Biometrika iv 22 
