Page:Scientia - Vol. X.djvu/112

104 application of quantitative methods not only to solve but also to furnish problems ready made. Biometry has now safely passed that stage in development which every new line of investigation passes through sooner or later, in which it suffers at the hands of its over- zealous would be friends. It is gradually coming to be clearly recognized by general biologists that biometric methods when properly used add an important weapon of research to the investigator's armament. It is the purpose of this paper to attempt in a very modest way to help along, if possible, this better understanding of and greater sympathy towards biometric work.

II.

The underlying and essential point of view of biometry has been, and to a considerable extent still is, quite generally misunderstood by biologists. In the first place biometry is often strongly and unjustly criticised because it has developed primarily as a « statistical» science. It is supposed that this method of inquiry cannot properly or profitably have anything to do with any problems not immediately reducible to frequency polygons and correlation tables. The charge is made that biometrical methods can deal only with mass phenomena, and that they intentionally disregard the detailed study of the individual. Such a charge is based on an entire misconception of the biometrical standpoint. This attitude, however, has done a great deal of harm in hindering the wider use of these methods by biologists. Nothing has been more strongly emphasized by the trend of recent biological discovery than the importance of the thorough, searching study of the individual, whether the matter under investigation be behavior, inheritance, variation, or morphogenesis. It is no recommendation for a new line of scientific inquiry to be supposed to ignore or belittle this fact. A second misconception which prevails rather widely is to the effect that biometric methods, being supposedly entirely statistical in character, necessarily require as a working postulate at the ontstart that the accumulation by selection