This document is an excerpt from a graduate course on advanced econometrics taught by Arthur Charpentier at Université de Rennes 1 in winter 2017. It discusses the origins and meaning of the term "regression" as coined by Francis Galton in reference to the tendency of offspring to regress towards the mean traits of the general population from their parents' traits. It also includes R code and plots demonstrating this concept using Galton's data on parental and offspring height.