TT is with considerable diffidence that I have accepted an invitation to I speak at this conference on teaching and education in biometry. My hesitation is primarily because biometry, however widely or narrowly we interpret it, is in the first place a branch of biology, and those of us who are professional statisticians must be careful to maintain a proper perspective. If we do not, we run a risk of attack comparable to that made on the early biometricians; for example, when Bateson in his Presidential address in 1904 to the British Association for the Advancement of Science,* speaking on genetical heredity and variation, asserted: Operating among such phenomena the gross statistical method is a misleading instrument; and applied to these intricate discriminations, the imposing Correlation Table into which the biometrical Procrustes fits his arrays of unanalyzed data is still no substitute for the common sieve of a trained judgment.... However, Bateson's strictures were coloured by a controversy since resolved; and the advances in biometry due to those like Karl Pearson and R. A. Fisher, who, whatever their many other qualifications, may certainly be called statisticians, give us some right to speak. I am moreover indebted to my colleague at the University of Manchester, Professor Eric Ashby, for indicating to me in conversation his own viewpoint as a biologist, and I hope in consequence that my discussion will not be unduly biased. I am not sure what is the official definition of Biometry or Biometrics accepted by our Society but I assume from the reference to biology in an early prospectus that the Society takes a wide view of its scope and does not necessarily identify this with the particular investigations of biological variation, co-variation and quantitative inheritance by Karl Pearson and other early biometricians, however important a nucleus these investigations constituted. Clearly we must include the further researches with which R. A. Fisher's name is so