542 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. ! 



i 



It will be interesting to test this law on some specific work, not i 



included in the table from which the law has been deduced. Ma- \ 

 caulay's 'History of England' is the only larger work whose sentence 



dimensions have been determined with reasonable accuracy. Here S i 

 was found to be 34.2, and substituting this in our formula we find 



P = 13.57 -7- ^34.2 = 2.32 j 



which is nearly equal to the value 2.30 as determined by actually count- 

 ing the finite verbs in 40,000 sentences. 



There is, of course, no reason to infer that our formula will apply 

 with equal accuracy to the sentence dimensions of every other work. 

 Variations from it must occur. The only conclusion that is warranted 

 is that when a reasonable number of works are selected whose predica- 

 tion frequency is nearly the same, and the average of these frequencies 

 is taken, this average will bear a definite relation to the average of 

 simple sentence ratios of the same works and that this relation is ap- 

 proximately expressed by our formula. 



