Shortly after R. A. Fisher's death in 1962, his long-time friend E. B. Ford prepared an informal appreciation, which fortunately was taped. The tape was lost for many years and only recently has come to light. It seems highly appropriate for publication in the Perspectives series. I thank George P. Box for bringing this tape to my attention.R. A. Fisher was the greatest statistician of his time, perhaps of all time. He was one of the great trio that included himself, Sewall Wright, and J. B. S. Haldane, who laid the mathematical foundations for evolutionary theory. His book, The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection (Fisher 1930), has been called the deepest book on evolution since Darwin.Fisher's name has appeared repeatedly in Perspectives, two of which have been devoted primarily to him (Crow 1988, 1990). Fisher's collected papers are a gold mine, for Fisher often put down his most profound and original ideas in “throw-away” articles, which were published in a five-volume set edited by Henry Bennett (Fisher 1971–1974). Fisher's great book (1930) has been reissued in a variorum edition (Fisher 1999). This is particularly useful because, in addition to an introduction by Bennett, it contains additions and amendments. Many of these provide much-needed clarification of some difficult points as Fisher's elegant obscurity was a source of both wonder and bewilderment to his readers. Finally, Fisher's daughter, Joan Box, has written a biography of her father (Box 1978). It is a scholarly account by a loving daughter, who nevertheless did not smooth over his rough spots.Fisher visited Wisconsin regularly to see his daughter, thereby providing occasions for me to visit with him. These were always pleasant meetings, for Fisher would discourse on anything, but especially on genetics. He was at his charming best. He enjoyed meeting people, the sole exception being Sewall Wright, with whom he had had a falling out in the 1930s; neither of them got over it.Edmund B. Ford (1901–1988) was a well-known British ecological geneticist, specializing in butterflies. He was a member of the Royal Society and a recipient of the Darwin Medal. His book on ecological genetics went through several editions and his monographs on moths and butterflies are still used. Ford, a strong selectionist, was especially interested in polymorphism and, with Fisher, strongly opposed Sewall Wright's evolutionary theory. He was also associated with H. B. D. Kettlewell in the study of industrial melanism in the peppered moth. His deepest admiration went to his friend Fisher, who preferred to call him Henry.Ford's tape-recorded tribute to R. A. Fisher follows. To preserve Ford's original speech as much as possible, we have made only minimal editorial changes. Here is a chance to view Fisher the man through the eyes of his closest and equally eccentric friend.J. F. Crow

SIR Ronald Fisher's great achievements as a statistician and geneticist are well known and available for study in the literature. It is not my purpose, therefore, to discuss them now but to speak as an old friend about his personality.

I think I should start by going back beyond my own knowledge of him to his school days. I was once talking with Arthur Vassal, for many years a schoolmaster at Harrow. He was no more than an acquaintance of mine and certainly was not aware of my friendship with Fisher. I asked if it were possible for him to name the 10 or 12 cleverest boys who had been through his hands. He said it would be difficult to do so but added that on sheer brilliance he could divide all those he had taught into two groups: one contained a single outstanding boy, R. A. Fisher; the other all the rest. It is of that one boy, grown up, that I now speak.

Our meeting, which took place in 1923, was typical of Fisher. Like so many good things in my life, it was due to Julian Huxley. Though I was only an undergraduate at Oxford at the time, Huxley and I were researching genetic physiology together in the earliest days of that subject. Meeting Fisher somewhere, Huxley mentioned that he knew an undergraduate [myself] who had interesting ideas on genetics and evolution. Fisher was a Fellow of Caius; he was only 33 but was already becoming famous. Other people in his position might possibly have asked briefly about me; a few might even have invited me to go to see them. Fisher's reaction was different. The Fellow of Caius took a train to Oxford to call on the undergraduate! Characteristically, it did not occur to him to let me know that he was coming, so I was out when he arrived and he settled down in my rooms in College to wait for me. On opening the door of the sitting room on my return, I was surprised to find it full of smoke from pipe tobacco, a thing which disgusts me, and to see a stranger there, a smallish man with red hair, a rather fierce, pointed red beard, and a very white face. The cast of his countenance slightly resembled that of King George V. As he got up and came toward me, I noticed his eyes, hard and glittering like a snake's and seen through spectacles with lenses so thick that they resembled transparent pebbles. He took my hand in a firm, bony grip and, bending slightly forward, he gave me a momentary but most searching inspection. Then his face relaxed into a charming smile, the beginning of nearly 40 years of friendship.

We had much in common in our general interests and in our science. It would be difficult for the younger generation today to recapture the attitude toward Darwinism in the mid-1920s. The evidence that Darwin provided for evolution was accepted and admired but his views of its mechanism were regarded, I think, as outmoded and they were certainly wrongly assessed. Natural selection was thought of as being of minor importance, only capable, at most, of bringing about small adaptations. It was held that, in the main, evolution was controlled by processes not really understood but at any rate vaguely mutational—a view to which the new science of genetics, or Mendelism, was believed somehow to contribute insofar as it had any evolutionary significance at all, and this was doubted. Fisher and I, together with Julian Huxley, were at that time almost alone in this, in our or in any other country, in preaching the importance of selection and in believing that the heritable variability upon which it could work was provided by Mendelism and in no other way. I ought to add that J. B. S. Haldane was of a similar opinion. These views drew Fisher, Huxley, and myself much together and Fisher, like Huxley, was delighted with the concept of studying evolution experimentally by means of field work combined with laboratory genetics.

In conversation, I found myself inhibited by some people, and certainly many were inhibited by Fisher, but he and I fit perfectly and, as Ronald Knox said, we could tire the sun out with talking. Yet Fisher was not always an easy companion. His vagueness in everyday affairs, and his untidiness, became a legend in his own time, and he could be irritable and inconsiderate. What he wanted took first place and it did not matter too much that other people were inconvenienced. This [was true] on the level of everyday affairs; with things of importance, it was different. He would see his friends through any difficulty or any crisis, sometimes at great trouble to himself. And who his friends were was a nice point. The answer, I suppose, was those whose ability he respected, together with possessing certain qualities of personality. In the matter of friendship, and the reverse, he would make a generally sound, and perhaps rather intuitive, decision and against it there was no appeal; nothing, so far as I know, would make him reverse an unfavorable judgment of anyone or let down a friend. I think his assessments were generally, but not always, correct. In-deed, in one sad instance, he failed to appreciate brilliant work because he did not approve of the scientist responsible for it.

He formed the poorest opinion of administrators and of those who gave up much of their time to administration. “An administrator, not the highest form of human life,” he would say and those who remember Fisher will know that he would put the remark more forcibly than I have quoted. He was furious at anything he held to be unjust. I remember his anger when on an important occasion someone mentioned that a candidate for the Royal Society had been the guilty party in a divorce case. Fisher held that nothing whatever but scientific ability and achievement should influence election to the Fellowship. On the occasion I have in mind, the man concerned was certainly not anyone he was supporting but he was not going to have him, as he conceived, unjustly treated.

On formal occasions, Fisher was appropriately dressed, and I have seen him looking decidedly smart. Normally, however, he wore old, untidy clothes. This, combined with his red beard and often challenging expression, might lead you to think, at a casual glance, that he was perhaps a Socialist agitator, but you would be wrong; he was a Conservative with a belief in the value of the aristocracy. Religion certainly meant something to him—I never really knew what or how much—and he twice preached in the chapel at Caius. I was told that his sermons were rather conventional. In later life, his hair and beard became white; otherwise he changed little.

He was the greatest statistician in the world, a geneticist of such prescience that the genius of his conclusions is still unfolding itself today, but he had many other interests. He subscribed to the journal Antiquity and read it carefully and with discernment, and I have known him to make knowledgeable comments on music though it was not important in his life.

He would look after his friends with rather touching solicitude. On one occasion he sat regarding me attentively and said, “You look tired and need to be refreshed.” And then, to someone whom, like myself, he had known for perhaps a quarter of a century, the unbelievable happened: he turned into an actor and with sparkling gaiety and skill, apparently well played, took the part of the young man selling family pictures in School for Scandal. Arriving in Cambridge to see him on a summer's day, he said to me, “You look tired. I shall take you on the river. You shall rest in the canoe while I paddle.” Dear Fisher was half blind, the river crowded, and the canoe unstable. He would charge boat after boat, calling out, “Look where you're going, sir!” I cannot think how it was that we were not upset. Since he and I were both in our normal clothes, that would have been most unwelcome. It was a most harrowing experience.

He would take part in anything that was going on. I was present when we all had rounds of pistol shooting after a most excellent picnic lunch party. Fisher with poor sight, his finger on the trigger, waved the gun uncertainly while his friends dived for cover.

I never knew a man who took a scientific point so quickly and so well. In the late 1920s I mentioned to him a thought not yet published, the possibility of making numerical estimates of wild organisms—it was butterflies that I was concerned with—by means of marking, release, and recapture. He had not envisaged the idea but he saw it in all its aspects and difficulties in a flash. The polymorphism concept delighted him with its possibility of studying rapid evolution. When we found a gene starting to spread in an isolated colony of a tiger moth, he said with glee, “This is a very ripe plum waiting to drop into our mouths.” We had great fun with it and obtained interesting results.

On one occasion, Fisher was in a group deeply engrossed in watching a piece of experimental work. Someone put an intricate question to him, unrelated to the matter at hand, one with which he certainly ought not to have been bothered with at the time. Fisher took no notice and continued his absorbed interest in what was going on. Suddenly, he turned round and gave the answer, after which he ignored the questioner. A friend of mine who was watching the proceedings said, “Now I have seen a great mind at work.”

Fisher was, of course, a fine mathematician, but difficult to follow. He would leap over intermediate stages in a calculation, leaving his colleagues floundering. I have several times heard a distinguished mathematician say, “He has evidently solved the problem, correctly, but I don't see how he has done it.” I think it is not unfair to say that there is a tendency for some mathematicians to be rather arrogant about their subject. Fisher was not of their number. He held that mathematics was one way of reaching at least general conclusions but not the only one, and, as he fully recognized, Charles Darwin, whom he so much admired, was in mathematics ludicrously incompetent.

Fisher was far ahead of his contemporaries, so far, indeed, that when his epoch-making book, Statistical Methods for Research Workers, was published in 1925, it did not receive one favorable review. At the time of his death in 1962, it was in its 14th edition, with reprints, and had been translated into six languages. In 1928 or 1929 he sent a paper for publication to a famous learned society. The assessors turned it down and the officers of the society unwisely left the matter there. It was published elsewhere in 1930 exactly as it stood and it has proved to be one of the fundamental works of evolutionary biology.

The project of studying evolution experimentally and writing a book on the subject after 25 years of research fascinated Fisher and I had his wholehearted approval. In the event, the work was, as often, slower than envisaged. It took over 30 years before the book could begin, but in the end it was written and Fisher had some opportunity of assessing it (see Ford 1975). The circumstances were these. Two years after his retirement from the Arthur Balfour Chair of Genetics at Cambridge, in 1957, Fisher went to live at Adelaide in Australia where he was received by the University with the honor he deserved and given good facilities. In 1961, he returned to England to see his friends and he stayed for some days with me in All Souls. I was then able to read about half the chapters of the book to him. I should interpolate that his friends generally read to him to save his eyes. Fisher expressed himself as satisfied with the progress of the work, planned, as he well knew, so long before. When I received his approval I put the question I had held in store for many years. I asked him if he would allow me to dedicate the book to him. He agreed, and I believe the compliment, the best I had to offer, brought him pleasure. The dedication had in the end to be slightly altered for by the time the book was published he was dead.

While at Oxford on this visit, we planned to meet in Italy some weeks later. Fisher was going to some congress or other and I was to pay one of my routine visits to Rome. Though not a Roman Catholic, he had been made a member of the Papal Academy as one of the outstanding intellects of the age, and he was anxious to show me the Pavilion in the Vatican Gardens where the Academy is housed. So on the last morning we drove to the station happily enough with our plans to see each other again quite soon. Yet as I stood by his train to say goodbye, I suddenly knew, quite certainly, that I should never see him again. Our meeting in Italy had to be cancelled for reasons we could not have foreseen. He went back to Australia and died there.

There seems little I can say by way of summary of so great a scientist and so great a friend except perhaps this: he was supremely an individualist, and if ever there was a man whose life was guided wholly by the truth, as he perceived it, it was Sir Ronald Fisher.

• Copyright © 2005 by the Genetics Society of America