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J. D. Pryce, MD, MC Path
Ipswich, England

JAMA. 1970;212(5):883-884.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

To the Editor.—

The attempt by Dr. Elveback and her colleagues to exorcise the ghost of Gauss (211:69-75, 1970), calls for some comment.

As they state, Gauss was primarily concerned with the theory of errors, but the components in an error distribution are analogous to those in any other type of measurement. If I measure the length of a table with a ruler I should get a single answer; however, the lengths of the table and the ruler vary with temperature and humidity, and there are parallax errors in reading the ruler, so I do not get a constant reading. Since there are three definable sources of variation, the range of measurements should be predictable; unfortunately, the three primary causes of variation, temperature, humidity, and parallax are themselves resultants of more remote causes, so that ultimately there are not three, but an indefinitely large number of determinant factors; as . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

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