'The first idea in Great Britain of an institute of applied statistics appears to have occurred to Florence Nightingale. She desired to found a professorship of applied statistics. The matter did not come to fruition because the funds she could afford for the purpose were inadequate in the opinion of her advisers, Jowitt and Galton. She asserted that many problems of medical hygiene, social welfare, and even political action, failed to attain satisfactory solutions because there was no adequate training in statistical science, and went so far as to affirm that men could only ascertain the mind and purpose of the Deity by studying his laws as exhibited statistically.

One side and one side only of Florence Nightingale’s work has been commemorated in the funds raised for the training of nurses. The future will probably show that the other dominant idea of her mind, the training of statisticians, was from the scientific standpoint of equal, if not greater, importance. No finer memorial could be raised to her memory than the endowment of an institute to fulfil this function. The suggestion that the combined department of the Biometric and Galton Laboratories should be called the Department of Applied Statistics was an echo of Florence Nightingale’s plea for a professorship of Applied Statistics. There is no doubt that her ideas and her suggestion worked on the mind of Francis Galton himself. Galton indeed widened Florence Nightingale’s conception of “applied statistics.” He realised three fundamental principles: (i) that statistics are an essentially mathematical science, and that no safe progress is possible except on a mathematical basis; (ii) that once such a science should be established, it must and would invade, as a new technique, almost every branch of existing science; (iii) that, even in the narrower field of adequate statistical theory as applied to social problems (sketched out with actual statement of problems demanding a solution, by Florence Nightingale), there was a new factor which had to be recognised the advance of our knowledge, namely the hereditary factor. He asserted that national progress was only possible provided you studied not only the effects of the environment, but the laws of genetics. He defined his new science as “the study of those agencies under social control that may improve or impair the racial faculties of future generations physically and mentally.” The words might almost be those of Florence Nightingale herself in her sketch of what she thought Applied Statistics should deal with. But Galton had added two features – (a) the statement that mathematical theory must be the basis of statistics, and (b) the conception that the observational study of heredity in man and the experimental study of heredity in animals must accompany the study of environment – that nature was as important in social problems as nurture. Galton reached the idea of an institute so endowed that it could carry out efficiently three aims: (i) the adequate training in statistical method, (ii) the observational and experimental research in genetics, (iii) the application of the knowledge thus gained to the problems of social hygiene. In short, Galton brought to Florence Nightingale’s vision the knowledge gained by his own researches in the theory of statistics, in heredity and anthropology.'