ABSTRACT
One of the first things we want to know if we are to make natural history scientific is how many animals of a particular kind there are in a certain area. We also need such knowledge if we are to use our land scientifically. If one wanted to know how many mussels there were between tidemarks on a particular beach it would be hopeless to count them all. To count field mice, Hacker and Pearson put down six traps provided with food and bedding in every hundred yard square of an area of woodland. For some purposes it is important to count the minimum number of breeding animals in the course of a year. When this gets small, the frequency of a character in the population may change by mere chance, quite apart from natural selection. Dubinin, who first demonstrated this, called this change by a Russian phrase translated as the genetico-automatic process.
