The author of this book has undertaken the difficult task of setting forth, for graduate students in the biological and social sciences, the most essential principles of biometry. The primary objective has been to emphasize the reasoning behind the statistical methods. Readers who hope this book may provide a royal road to statistics will inevitably be disappointed. However, the book abounds in numerical examples from clinical and preventive medicine, and prospective authors of papers reporting therapeutic results would do well to read the section on the fourfold table on pages 231 to 237.
A number of subjects of great interest to medical readers are not represented in the index: the rank-difference method of estimating correlation, measurement of reliability and validity, Spearman's coefficient of correlation, self-correlation, test-retest methods, and the problem of scoring new tests. The author also confuses his reader by using the word "control" in different senses on pages