A method for displaying multivariate data graphically as ‘trees’ in which the values of the variables are coded into the length of the terminal branches and the terminal branches have lengths that depend on the sums of the terminal branches they support. One important feature of these trees that distinguishes them from most other compound characters, for example, Chernoff’s faces, is that an attempt is made to remove the arbitrariness of assignment of the variables by performing an agglomerative hierarchical cluster analysis of the variables and using the resultant dendrogram as the basis tree.