receive the degree of Sc. D. from Cambridge in 1908 and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1932. His proposers were Sir Edmund Taylor Whittaker, George James Lidstone, Alexander Aitken and William Ogilvy Kermack. Sheppard was not unique in combining a civil service career with mathematical research; an almost exact contemporary was Thomas Little Heath, the historian of Greek mathematics, who went higher in the Civil Service and became much better known as an author. Another contemporary was the civil servant and statistician R H Hooker. Sheppard published his first paper in 1888 and then he published nothing during his legal years. Then he resumed publishing in 1897 and kept going until 1931. Sheppard was encouraged to turn his mathematical skills to statistics by Francis Galton, whom he had met during his Cambridge days when he visited Galton's Anthropometric Laboratory. In his memorial piece Aitken placed Sheppard with Edgeworth, Pearson and Yule as a contributor to the development of statistics at the turn of the 20th. century. The assessment was based on the series of papers on correlation and the calculation of moments that Sheppard produced between 1897 and 1907. The first Sheppard's correction paper was in 1897. After 1907 the focus of Sheppard's work moved from statistics to interpolation and graduation and he published in mathematical and actuarial journals. The characteristics of Sheppard's work that Aitken emphasised were "thoroughness and independence." "Agility, shafts of brilliance, these are not to be found; but there is not a trace of the superficiality which sometimes goes with these qualities." At the fifth International Congress of Mathematicians held in 1912 in Cambridge, Sampson presented a paper entitled Reduction of errors by means of negligible differences. When Sheppard died he was remembered in the Mathematical Gazette with a one-page note; Sheppard had been president of the Mathematical Association in 1928. The Annals of Eugenics published a long family memoir by Sheppard's son and an account of Sheppard's scientific work by Aitken. (These pieces form the basis of the present article.) The editor of the journal, Ronald Fisher, also contributed a piece. Fisher knew Sheppard through his work on mathematical tables. Of Sheppard's work, Fisher wrote, "We find practically nothing that ought to be retracted, and very little that is now obsolete." However, it is clear from Fisher's article and from the notes he added to Aitken's that Sheppard's main