78   PROBABILITY

could reasonably be anticipated, did not at first attract investigators. The idea of effecting an improvement in that direction was too much in advance of the march of popular imagination, so I had to wait. In the meantime I occupied myself with collateral problems, more especially with that of dealing measurably with faculties that are variously distributed in a large population. The results were published in my ' Natural Inheritance' in 1889, and I shall have occasion to utilize some of them later on, in this very lecture. The publication of that book proved to be more timely than the former. The methods were greatly elaborated by Professor Karl Pearson, and applied by him to Biometry. Professor Weldon, of this University, whose untimely death is widely deplored, aided powerfully. A new science was thus created primarily on behalf of Biometry, but equally applicable to Eugenics, because their provinces overlap.

The publication of Biolnetrika, in which I took little more than a nominal part, appeared in 1go1.

Being myself appointed Huxley Lecturer before the Anthropological Institute in 1go1 I took for my title ' The possible improvement of the Human Breed under the existing conditions of Law and Sentiment' (Nature, November 1, 1go1, Report of the Smithsonian Institute, Washington, for the same year, and reprinted in this volume.)