In the opening words of his preface to Studies in American Demography, published in 1940, Professor Willcox says: "During the last half century demography, or the statistical study of population, has grown from infancy into lusty youth." During the same half century Professor Willcox published what he calls "fragments" which he had once hoped "with ardor born of youth and inexperience" would be an Introduction to American Demography but he found himself handicapped by the then inadequacies of American birth and death statistics. Nevertheless, he pursued his goal with vigor and effectiveness with the result that up to 1940 he had published more than 100 of what he terms his "more important writings." These appeared in official government publications, in professional journals, in encyclopaedias, as monographs and in books which he edited or to which he contributed. He managed to deal with almost the entire gamut of demographic statistics. His subjects ranged from estimating total world population (from 1650) to studies of marriage and divorce, birth and death rates, migration and health statistics and registration and census methods. All these investigations were extremely valuable in themselves, illuminating usually for the first time, many diverse problems of American society. But perhaps more important, they represented the application of statistical methods to sociology and thus paved the way for later scholars, with vastly improved basic data, to probe deeper into social problems and their interrelationships. In the "Introductory Definitions" to his Studies in American Demography, Professor Willcox summarizes his position by saying: "I have long agreed with recent statements that 'except for statistics . . . no new technique for studying social problems has been developed in modern times' [T. N. Carver] and that 'it is principally by the aid of such methods that these studies may be raised to the rank of sciences' [R. A. Fisher]. These convictions lie at the root of my predominant interest in statistical sociology." Professor Willcox' studies represented pioneer work in the subjects selected and in the analytical methods used. Walter Francis Willcox was born on March 22, 1861 in Reading, Massachusetts. He graduated with an A.B. degree from Amherst College in 1884. He received an A.M. degree from Amherst in 1888, an LL.B. degree in 1887 and a Ph.D. degree in 1891, both from Columbia, and an honorary LL.D. degree from Amherst in 1906. EDITOR'S NOTE