A Beautiful Regression (1877)

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

This beautiful bit of data visualization was a significant development in the history of statistics and was employed in pioneer Sir Francis Galton's "Typical Laws of Heredity, III", which appeared in Nature magazine on April 19, 1877.  

[Image: Francis Galton, "Typical Laws of Heredity, III", Nature. p 513, April 19, 1877] 

This contribution by Galton is the "first major step in the development of correlation and regression analysis" according to Judy Klein's Statistical Visions in Time: A History of Time Series Analysis, 1662-1933, (page 131). She continues: 

 And the description of the apparatus used to produce the dataviz above, from the above-mentioned issue of Nature;