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The remainder of his days he passed in quiet, earning a living by writing, his most consider- able work being a History of Monmouthshire, published in two volumes in 1796; clinging obstinately to his political ideals; and lavishing his care on the child of his own creation, the Literary Fund, which he had brought into exist- ence in 1790, after several failures, to aid The Statistical Study of Heredity and its Bearing on Social Reform.* By D. Caradog Jones. I. WHEN the term social problem is used it is natural for the mind to jump at once to ideas of poverty, unemployment, intem- perance, vice, and crime. These ab- normalities certainly do create problems for us, although the normal functioning of society is no less a problem, if not perhaps a social problem in the accepted sense of the term. However, just as doctors have learnt a great deal about the normal functioning of the body by attacking the problem of disease, so we have learnt not a little about the body of society by taking a pathological interest in unusual conditions which are observed in certain of its members. What makes one man poor while another grows rich ? What is the root cause of crime or vice? To interpret poverty as due to intemper- ance carries us no further forward than we should be by interpreting intemperance as due to poverty. Is the tendency to such conditions gradually acquired by human beings after birth, the result in short of their environment, or are they the result of inborn characteristics which no amount of tinkering with the environment can eradicate ? I propose to touch briefly upon such questions as these in an attempt to trace the development of statistical methods in the study of inheritance. I shall no doubt introduce matter that is familiar to many, but familiar examples often serve best to illustrate abstract principles. I would begin by pointing out that the statistical method involves three processes the collection of facts, the analysis of facts, and the interpretation of facts. But although this division is a convenient one, it is not always easy to separate one process clearly from another because there is so close a relation between them. As a rule facts are not The substance of this article was first delivered in lecture form; hence the intrusion of the too personal pronoun.-D.C,J. necessitous literary men. In 1805 he moved into the headquarters of the Fund, in Gerrard Street, Soho, his function being to inquire into the merits of applications for financial aid from needy authors. Here he died, at the age of 78, in June, 1816. The Fund whose foundations he laid remains to this day, and certainly no man could desire a nobler monument. collected at random-they are collected for some purpose, and that purpose frequently affects the collection, the analysis and the interpretation. Take, for instance, the decennial census of the population. The forms which are issued to every householder contain questions designed to elicit certain information. If they are carefully framed the second stage in the process, the analysis of the facts, consists in assembling together in single totals and in various combina- tions the answers given on the individual forms. The third stage, the interpretation of the facts, consists in a statement of the information derived by examining these totals and relating them to one another and to other facts. When the whole scheme is directed by a single authority the nature of the information desired will naturally govern the processes of collection and analysis, and they in turn will provide the material for interpretation. But frequently it happens that one authority collects and analyses the facts and another then steps in to interpret them. In the publications of the Registrar-General there is abundant material to browse upon in this way, and one is tempted to wonder what conclusions a social student like the Rev. Robert Malthus would draw from them if he were alive to-day. It is well known how he once wrote a celebrated Essay on the Principle of Population," in which he proclaimed that children were being produced at a faster rate than bread to feed them, an essay which had a most remarkable effect upon the people and even the government of his time. There was, in his view, a continual struggle for existence going on owing to the pressure of population upon the means of subsistence. No rise in wages could take place unless this devas- tating torrent of children into the world was checked, and, failing such a check, there was no hope of improving the lot of mankind. We turn over the page of history and see Charles Darwin reading this same essay some forty years later, and about fifteen months after he had begun his systematic enquiry into the origin of species. It struck him in a flash that if the argument applied to man, why not to animals, birds, plants, insects, and indeed every form of life. Throughout the whole of creation was there not a similar struggle going on? Here we see the statistical method in full swing first, the collection of facts then,