KARL PEARSON: SOCIALIST AND DARWINIST.

The article gives profiles Karl Pearson, a socialist and Darwinist. He had studied at the University College School and had been Third Wrangler in the Mathematical Tripos of 1879 at Cambridge. He proceeded with his study and practice of the law in England. But the law seemed rather narrow to a young man with wide interests and through the efforts of his friends, and with his success in the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos sustaining him, he was offered and persuaded to accept the Goldsmid Professorship of Applied Mathematics and Mechanics at University College, London in 1884. In his new post, Pearson determined to employ his mathematics to prove Darwinian theory correct. In the course of these efforts, he played a leading role in creating the subject of biometrics, statistical biology, and helped to establish, in 1901, the journal devoted to the subject, "Biometrika." Pearson's socialism was not easily classifiable. He appears to have been an adherent of Marxist economics. In an address to London working-men during the eighties, he spoke of sociologist Karl Marx as "the great economist" and defended the labor theory of value, which had already been brought under considerable attack.