For most of the first half of this century the dominant figure in Canadian statistics was Robert Coats. The principal facts of his life and career are given in an obituary written for this Journal (August, 1960, pp. 482–3) by Mr. Herbert Marshall. It now seems appropriate to make a first attempt to sum up his effort and achievement. We hope that this brief article will encourage a more detailed account of Coats's work and a more penetrating statement of its enduring effects.

For twenty-five years Coats was Dominion Statistician, a post created for him, whose potential importance he perceived early and whose strategic role he firmly established. He not only shaped Canadian statistical organization; he shaped it in a characteristically self-conscious way, adding to the effectiveness of a practical administrator a sense of the long-range implications of his actions. He has left a number of papers in which some of his philosophy is made explicit in the phrases of a master of essay writing. He had a clear notion of the kind of theory that would help to collect and interpret practical data, in contrast to the many curiosities that were then included in statistical courses. In his presidential address to the American Statistical Association in 1938, he asked for a book that would elucidate statistical theory for the practising statistician, a call that has since been answered in several volumes.