A Shrine

Prof. Karl Pearson presented, through the press, a moving appeal for American financial assistance in preserving the home of Charles Darwin at Down, Kent, offered for sale, as a memorial museum and experiment station for research in evolution and genetics. Darwin lived there from 1842 until his death in 1882, and most of his books, including the Origin of Species and the Descent of Man, were written there. The New York Evening Post, commenting on Prof. Pearson's plea that the war has left England too poor to do this, says: "Americans should be proud to raise part of it and Englishmen ashamed to let them raise it all."

Dr. Pearson himself is one of the world's greatest scientists, a man distinctly in the Darwinian tradition, and exponent of the eugenics movement founded by Francis Galton, professor of applied mathematics at University College, London, Director of the Galton Laboratory there. He has built up almost single-handed the modern science of higher statistics, including the coefficient of correlation, and is editor of Biometrika. One of his greatest works, The Grammar of Science, is the Bible of statisticians and exact scientists. Presumably he hopes to make the Darwin property another such intellectual center as he has founded in London.