The "biometric school" founded by K. Pearson, F. Galton, and W. F. R. Weldon was concerned especially with heredity and variation, and between the wars "biometry" was not widely used as a general term for quantitative biology. The foundation of the Biometric Society encouraged this wider usage, and medical and biological statistics were seen to share a common methodology. In recent years, medical statistics has developed more rapidly, and this growth has been reflected in the contents of Biometrics. The author stresses the essential unity of the subject, the central core of which is the application of statistics in the life sciences. The Society should encourage contact with those workers in quantitative biology who are outside this central tradition.