2DkcTXceO

M.E. Thompson 205Pearson in England. Always on the lookout for references to the practice ofstatistics in Canada, Dr. Bellhouse has recently come across a 1915 letter inthe files of Karl Pearson from one of his assistants in the field of craniometry,New Zealander Kathleen Ryley, who had by 1915 emigrated to Canada. Wefind that she had first visited Canada on a trip to Winnipeg in August 1909,among many women from abroad attending the meetings of the British Associationfor the Advancement of Science at the University of Manitoba. Whenshe moved to Canada, she undertook the running of the Princess PatriciaRanch in Vernon, British Columbia — a fascinating story in itself (Yarmie,2003). Pearson’s biographer notes that the women who studied or worked withKarl Pearson in the early days generally had trouble finding positions in whichthey could continue statistical work (Porter, 2004).Official statistics came into its own in Québec with the founding in 1912of the Bureau de la statistique du Québec (Beaud and Prévost, 2000), and theDominion Bureau of Statistics (now Statistics Canada) came about throughthe Statistics Act in 1918; for a detailed account, see Worton (1998). Datafrom censuses conducted at least every ten years since 1851 can now be studiedto provide a picture of the evolution of the status of women in the country,particularly following digitization of samples from the census beginning with1911; see Thomas (2010).Statistics was slow to enter the academy in North America, in both theUnited States and Canada (Huntington, 1919). According to Watts (Watts,1984), statistics courses were taught at the University of Manitoba beginningin 1917 by Lloyd A.H. Warren — Isobel Loutit’s professor — who was developingcurricula for actuarial science and commerce (Rankin, 2011). Wattscites a 1918 article by E.H. Godfrey as saying that no Canadian universitywas then teaching statistics as “a separate branch of science.” However, therewere at that time in the École des hautes études commerciales in Montréal(now HEC Montréal) a Chair of Statistics and “a practical and comprehensivecurriculum”; at the University of Toronto, statistics was a subject in thesecond year of the course in Commerce and Finance.The first teachers of statistics as a subject in its own right in mathematicsdepartments included E.S. Keeping in Alberta, and George L. Edgettat Queen’s, who taught a statistics course in 1933. Daniel B. DeLury, whotaught my first course in statistics in 1962 at the University of Toronto, hadbegun teaching at the University of Saskatchewan in the period 1932–35. Somestatistics was taught by biologists, particularly those involved in genetics. Geneticistand plant breeder Cyril H. Goulden is said to have written the firstNorth American textbook in biostatistics in 1937, for the students he wasteaching at the University of Manitoba. Yet as late as 1939, Dominion StatisticianRobert H. Coats lamented that “five of our twenty-two universities donot know the word in their curricula” (Coats, 1939).