Histories of econometrics describe what econometricians did with the ideas of statisticians—correlation, regression, maximum likelihood, testing statistical hypotheses, etc. The transfer of these ideas was made possible by institutions, practices, and personal contacts between statisticians...

The period 1895–1925 saw the origins and establishment of the fields that came to be called econometrics and psychometrics. I consider what these fields owed to biometry—the statistical approach to the biological problems of evolution—and make some comparisons between all three. I...