 Statistics has come to play an increasingly important role in the methodology of the experimental sciences from the 19th century onwards. At that time, statistics and probability theory took on a methodological role as an analysis of inductive inference, and attempts to ground the rationality of induction in the axioms of probability theory have continued throughout the 20th century and in to the present. Developments in the theory of statistics itself, meanwhile, have had a direct and immense influence on the experimental method, including methods for measuring the uncertainty of observations such as the Method of Least Squares developed by Legendre and Gauss in the early 19th century, criteria for the rejection of outliers proposed by Peirce by the mid-19th century, and the significance tests developed by Gosset (a.k.a. “Student”), Fisher, Neyman &amp; Pearson and others in the 1920s and 1930s (see, e.g., Swijtink 1987 for a brief historical overview; and also the entry on  C.S. Peirce).