Complete Record - Heirs of Hippocrates No. 2258

CHARLES BENEDICT DAVENPORT (1866-1944) Statistical methods with special reference to biological variation. John Wiley & Sons 1904 2nd rev. ed. viii, 223 pp., tables. 16.7 cm.

A native of Stamford, Connecticut, Davenport received a degree in civil engineering from Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute in 1886. He soon abandoned that profession to enter Harvard where he studied zoology and received a Ph.D. degree in 1892. He taught at Harvard, the University of Chicago, and in 1904 became director of the Station for Experimental Evolution at Cold Spring Harbor, New York where he also established and directed the Eugenics Record Office in 1910. He was primarily interested in animal genetics, human heredity, and eugenics. Although Davenport retired from active leadership at Cold Spring Harbor in 1934, he remained to continue his research and experimentation. He began his research with statistical studies of populations in the 1890s and was a pioneer in the application of biometric methods in the United States. The present manual was very successful and went through four editions between 1899 and 1936. It contains summaries of the newest statistical methods as well as working formulas and statistical tables for use in the study of variation. It was in this second edition that Davenport introduced the ideas and methods of Karl Pearson (1857-1936), the English statistician who introduced the chi square test.

Cited references: Garrison-Morton 1707

Gift of William B. Bean, M.D