This is the first volume in Benchmark Paper in Systematic and Evolutionary Biology. It, like the other volumes in the series, is a collection of already published papers. In this volume the emphasis is on the Multivariate Analysis of Variance and related topics such as Discriminant Analysis and Cluster Analysis. There is a mix between theory and applications, the latter being drawn primarily from the fields of Biology, Ecology and Genetics, the audience for which this book is intended. Each section is preceded by a short editorial introduction. As can be seen by the table of contents, many of these papers are classics in the field.