The Present Status of Biometry

In the founding of the Biometric Society, a wise decision was taken to regard biometry as roughly synonymous with quantitative biology and as a discipline requiring the cooperation of biologists, mathematicians, and statisticians. It seems appropriate to present some review of the major current areas of research. The field has grown to such an extent, however, that this review must be based on a small and biased sample of the literature, a defect which it is hoped will be remedied in the discussion following the paper. For this review the field is divided into two sections: statistical techniques, which comprise the design of experiments, sampling techniques and methods for the analysis of data, and biological applications, which deal with the uses inade of these tools in biology. The principles of sound experimental design are gradually coming to be appreciated, though dissemination is still uneven. In recent years many papers have appeared which apply these principles to a wide range of experimentation, and serve a valuable expository purpose. Examples of the topics dealt with are microbiological assays (Wood and Finney, 1946), the effect of streptomycin on pulmonary tuberculosis (British Medical Research Council, 1948), remedies for headaches (Jellinek, 1946), the assay of tetanus antitoxin (Ipsen, 1942), the assav of penicillin (Bliss, 1946), feeding trials on milk cows (Cochran et al, 1941), tests of mosquito repellents (Wadley, 1946), and the stimulation of denervated muscle by electric currents (Solandt et al, 1943). The newer developments are mainly specialized devices for decreasing the work required in an experiment. Three techniques are described-the fractional replication of large factorial experiments (Finney, 1945, 1946), the up and down method for sensitivity experiments (Dixon and Mood, 1948) and sequential experimentation (Wald, 1947). Sampling theory has advanced to the point where good sampling is relatively simple, provided that the population can be divided into accessible sampling-units and that satisfactory methods of measurement have been devised. Many problems remain where these conditions are