Sent from Karl Pearson
Description:

‘Dear Sir,

I fear you may think, me rather unjustified in writing to ask a favour of you. I am unable owing to the pressing need of a real holiday to give my Easter course of lectures at Gresham College and shall have to give them by deputy. Thus session’s lectures have been entirely on the Laws of Chance & their applications, and the four Easter lectures were to have been on the geometrical aspect of chance, i.e. on probability curves and their applications. The audience is a popular, but appreciative one and amounts to some three hundred souls. As I cannot lecture myself, and as I am very desirous that the lectures should be more or less continuous, it has struck me that lectures by specialists on the application of chance to various branches of science would be of great interest and value to my audience. My colleague Professor Weldon has assented to give one of the four lectures, on some topic illustrating the laws of chance from biology. Is it possible that you could be induced to give another illustrating its relations to anthropology? The honorarium (£7.7) can only be looked upon as a help to illustrating the lecture, should you care to do so, and is not likely to be an inducement to any one in itself. But I think a course of four lectures such as I suggest would have value to a number of persons, and I think I can promise you an appreciative if popular audience. The lectures have at any rate the historical interest of having gone on continuously since the days when Robert Hooke & Christopher Wren gave a real lustre to Gresham College. I am, dear sir,

Yours faithfully,

Karl Pearson.

The date of the lecture would be April 19, 20 or 21.’