Page:Scientia - Vol. X.djvu/116

108 data on which it is based. It is very easy to demonstrate that this is not true.

While, as has been pointed out in this section, the methods and point of view of biometry have not always been understood, yet the indications are that matters are improving very rapidly in this respect. In particular the great interest and activity now being displayed in the study of inheritance and plant and animal breeding is doing much to increase the use of biometric methods. Breeders are accumulating masses of data which they wish to analyze. To do this necessitates in many cases the use of biometric methods. As the really purposeful employment of these methods to help solve practical problems increases they must inevitably come to be better understood by the great mass of biologists.

III.

Let us now turn to a consideration of some of the ways in which biometrical methods may be of immediate value to the progress of biology. What has biometry to offer to biology that is useful ? Or, in other words, what is the significance of biometry? Stated most broadly it may be said that biometry brings to biology a fairly well developed method or system for the more precise, accurate and complete description of biological phenomena. Biometry is, in last analysis, a descriptive method. Like all other descriptive methods, or phases of science, it is not likely in and by itself ever to solve completely any problems. It must always work in conjunction with the exi^e- rimental method to attain the highest (i. e., most valuable) type of results. But at the same time it brings to the aid of the experimentalist that which is of the utmost importance, namely an adequate method of describing, analyzing and in general reaching correct conclusions from the results of experimentation.

Biometry affords an extension of descriptive methods in a direction where such an extension is an absolute requisite of scientific work, and in a direction where no other method