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CHAPTER EIGHT

Pearson, the well-known statistician also published "proofs" of the "inferiority" of the first- and second-born, gives a weight and authority to this mistake, which is most unfortunate, and few in England seem to know the refutation of his views, and exposure of his fallacies in this connection, made by Prof. Macaulay, the Ex-President of the Actuarial Society of America.[1] Also in this country Greenwood and Yule[2] demonstrated some of the objections to accepting Prof. Pearson's conclusions. The subject frequently comes up for partial discussion, as in the Correspondence columns of the Lancet and elsewhere, and references to the theme are too numerous to be considered here.

Some very interesting data were collected by Ansell long ago,[3] who showed that the

  1. ↑ T. B. Macaulay. "The Supposed Inferiority of First and Second Born Members of Families—Statistical Fallacies." The Herald Press, Montreal.
  2. ↑ M. Greenwood and G. Udney Yule (1914): "On the Determination of Size of Family and of the Distribution of Characters in Order of Birth from Samples taken through Members of the Sibships," Journ. R. Statist Soc., vol. lxxvii, pp. 179-199. London, 1914.
  3. ↑ Charles Ansell (1874): "On the Rate of Mortality at Early periods of Life, the age at marriage, the number of children to a marriage, the length of a generation, and other statistics of families in the Upper and Professional Classes." Pp. ii, 89. London, 1874.

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