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Statistical Investigations   375

and the idea of her tickled the fancy of Mr Punch, who in the issue that followed the publication of Galton's paper thus apostrophises her:

The Squeeze of 86.

Maiden of the mighty muscles,   Husbands be it sadly stated,

There recorded, you would be   Have been known their wives to whack,

Famous in all manly tussles,   You, unless you're over-rated,

And its very clear to me,   Could give such endearments back.

That if in the dim hereafter   Yours the task to try correction,

Any husband should play tricks,   Till your husband and your "chicks,"

You would with derisive laughter,   Had a lively recollection

Give a "Squeeze of 86."   Of your "Squeeze of 86."

Punch, April 15, 1884.

Galton's second table exhibits the full advantages of his method of percentiles, but presents also its disadvantages, as it does not allow us to deduce the usual frequency constants with any reasonable accuracy. At the same time it is easily understood by the non-statistical, who can readily determine from it their rank for any character. Thus suppose a man between 23 and 26 years of age to have aa vital or breathing capacity of 190 cubic inches, he sees at once from the table that he is surpassed by 70 °/o of men (1"99) and himself surpasses 20'/. (187). A simple rule of three sum then indicates

to him that he lies -A or 4 of the way from 80 to 70 or at 77.5. In other

words he would rank between the 77th and 78th men in a population of 100 young adults similar to those who visited the anthropometric laboratory.

We-ages and numbers in the table' on the following page possibly require some justification. All Galton says is that he had

"groups of appropriate cases extracted from the duplicate records by Mr J. Henry Young of the General Registry Office. I did not care to have the records exhausted, but requested him to take as many as seemed in each case to be sufficient to give a trustworthy result for these and certain other purposes to which I desired to apply them. The precise number was determined by accidental matters of detail that in no way implied selection of the measurements." (p. 278.)

Now-a-days we should consider it needful to keep the probable errors in view, which are occasionally somewhat large for small series treated by the method of percentiles. Galton deduced his percentiles from the frequency distributions by summing, plotting, drawing a curved line through the plotted points and then interpolating for the actual percentiles by graphical interpolation'.


"the population of England hardly contains enough material to form even a few regiments of efficient Amazons."

1 This table with the description of its method of preparation was also published in Nature, January 8, 1885 (Vol. xxxi, pp. 223-5), a month or two before its appearance in the Journal of the Anthropological Institute,

2 The method with more detail was discussed by Galton under the title "The Application of a Graphic Method to Fallible Measures" in a paper communicated to the Jubilee Congress of the Royal Statistical Society and published in the Jubilee Volume of the Statistical Society, 1885, pp. 262-5. The method consists in drawing an ogive curve from the data and interpolating for the percentiles. The same end could be reached by integrating the frequency histogram and dividing its final ordinate into equal parts corresponding to the percentiles. This may, of course, be rapidly done by the integraph.