The contemporary development of
bootstrap methods, from the time of Efron's early articles to the
present day, is well documented and widely appreciated. Likewise,
the relationship of bootstrap techniques to certain early work on
permutation testing, the jackknife and cross-validation is well
understood. Less known, however, are the connections of the bootstrap to
research on survey sampling for spatial data in the first half of the
last century or to work from the 1940s to the 1970s on subsampling
and resampling. In a selective way, some of these
early linkages will be explored,
giving emphasis to developments with which the
statistics community tends to be less familiar. Particular
attention will be paid to the work of P. C. Mahalanobis, whose development in
the 1930s and 1940s of moving-block sampling methods for spatial
data has a range of interesting features, and to contributions of
other scientists who, during the next 40 years, developed
half-sampling, subsampling and resampling methods.