ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION There has always been one strand of thought which claims that the past is strewn with so much of ignorance-especially in scientific pursuits-that it is fruitless to go back to it. But that approach would deny us the many insights into the present position of any discipline because there is no present that did not have a past. There is a particular danger that this type of myopic approach is adopted in the case of recently developed academic disciplines like econometrics because people assume that, as they are of recent origin, they are free from historical puzzles.
