In the late nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries, Galton, Pearson and Yule, addressing in part social issues as well as those arising in their prime concern with evolutionary biology, created ‘the new English statistics’, which provided an essential methodological foundational for sociological science. Galton moved on from Quetelet in seeing the Gaussian error curve as the basis for determining not different social types but rather the extent of individual variation within human populations. Through struggling with the problems of a naturalistic sociology that he sought to develop, founded on the inheritance of individual characteristics, notably ability, he introduced the techniques of regression and correlation into quantitative data analysis. Pearson and Yule then significantly refined and advanced these techniques and also pioneered – if in the course of a fierce controversy – the analysis of contingency tables.