The Scope and Importance to the State of the Science of National Eugenics

London: Dulau and Co., Ltd., 1911. Third printing.

SCARCE ILLUSTRATED TEXT OF 1907 LECTURE BY LEADING BRITISH EUGENICIST.

13.5x22 cm pamphlet, blue printed paper wrappers, 45 pp, 6 figures (2 folding), 1 page list of publications of University of London, 1 page description of the Francis Galton Laboratory for National Eugenics, inside back cover list of publications of University of London Biometric Laboratory, back cover list of Eugenic Laboratory publications. Cover edges chipped with no loss of text, light browning to pages, very good in archival mylar sleeve.

KARL PEARSON (1857-1936) graduated from King's College, Cambridge in 1879, then studied physics at the University of Heidelberg and physiology at the University of Berlin. He then returned to mathematics, deputizing for the mathematics professor at King's College London in 1881 and for the professor at University College London in 1883. 1891 saw him also appointed to the professorship of Geometry at Gresham College; here he met Walter Frank Raphael Weldon, a zoologist who had some interesting problems requiring quantitative solutions. The collaboration, in biometry and evolutionary theory, was a fruitful one and lasted until Weldon died in 1906. Weldon introduced Pearson to Charles Darwin's cousin Francis Galton, who was interested in aspects of evolution such as heredity and eugenics. Pearson's work was all-embracing in the wide application and development of mathematical statistics, and encompassed the fields of biology, epidemiology, anthropometry, medicine, psychology, eugenics, and social history.