Karl Pearson

THIS handsome volume is a reprint of two articles recently published in Biometrika (vols. 28 and 29), with the addition of a couple of extra appendixes giving respectively the full syllabuses of Karl Pearson's Gresham College lectures on statistics during 1891–94, and notes of his lecture-courses on that subject at University College, London, in 1894–95 and 1895–96. The author asks “that wider audience” to which the memoir is now made available to bear in mind that it is “in no sense a Life” of his father. That seems to be going a little too far. In so far as a man's labours are his life—and for Karl Pearson they were that to a greater extent than for most men—this is an admirable Life: brief certainly, with plenty of room for filling in details, but well-ordered, and very readable at all events by the statistician, to whom it is mainly addressed, much being inavitably more or less technical. But there is more in it than this. Portraits, letters, lighter sketches of life on vacation or in the laboratory, and friendships, serve to fill in the human side of the picture. Karl Pearson: an Appreciation of some Aspects of his Life and Work. By E. S. Pearson. Pp. viii + 170 + 9 plates. (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1938.) 10 s . 6 d . net.