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The article presents information about Samuel S. Wilks, a great contributor to statistics. Wilks' behavior toward applications was peculiarly split, he encouraged his students to work on applications, not always an easy thing to do in a strongly theoretical mathematics department; he often told students about applications that he regarded as "neat" or "cute" or "clever"; the statistical colloquium he guided often had speakers on practical applications of mathematical statistics; he himself wrote some practical papers in statistics, but in the classroom he rarely discussed applications. Repeatedly, however, practical problems explicitly influenced both his own publications and those of his students and Wilks often used applications as motivation for the discussion of distribution theory, usually going well beyond the needs of the original problem. The papers to be discussed exhibit incompletely and fragmentarily a major influence on the work of the man and his students. Wilks watched the development of the statistical theory of order statistics closely. Indeed he wrote a masterful summary of the literature. The general area involves the study of the statistical properties of ordered measurements.

The article reports on sampling problems in trade statistics in the field of marketing. The author focuses on the success rate and reliability of patented sampling techniques utilized by the U.S. Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce. Government sampling techniques relevant to the retail and wholesale trade are criticized. A case study focusing on grocery wholesales located in the U.S. is discussed in relation to the 1935 Census of Distribution. Applications of the Chi Square test are also examined.