1 88 



POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



time showed clearly the prints of the 

 angel's feet, and these, a little worn, 

 are represented on the stone as it is 

 preserved to-day. 1 owe the accom- 

 panying photograph of this stone to 

 the courtesy of Professor Carl H. 

 Eigenmann. 



The stone suggests the sole condi- 

 tion under which communistic or 

 socialistic organizations have been 

 economically successful — that of com- 

 plete subordination of the individual 

 wills to the will of some one individ- 

 ual supposed to have mystic power or 

 a divine commission. 



David Starr Jordan. 



de morgan on the 'sherman 

 principle: 



To the Editor: Apropos of the 

 papers which have recently appeared 

 in the Popular Science Monthly and 

 elsewhere dealing with the frequency 

 distribution of word and sentence 

 lengths in the writings of various au- 

 thors, the following extract from a 

 letter written by Professor De Morgan 

 in 1851 is, I think, of some interest. 

 The letter from which the extract is 

 taken w T as written to the Rev. W. 

 Heald, and is dated August 18, 1851. 

 It is printed in the ' Memoir of 

 Augustus De Morgan,' edited by his 

 wife, Sophia Elizabeth De Morgan (pp. 

 214-216). After dealing with sun- 

 dry other matters the letter proceeds 

 in this way: "I wish you would do 

 this: run your eye over any part of 

 those of St. Paul's Epistles which be- 

 gin with 7rau\os— the Greek, I mean — 

 and without paying any attention to 

 the meaning. Then do the same with 

 the Epistle to the Hebrews, and try to 

 balance in your own mind the question 

 whether the latter does not de.il in 

 longer words than the former. It has 

 always run in my head that a little ex- 

 penditure of money would settle ques- 

 tions of authorship in this way. The 

 best mode of explaining what I would 



try will be to put down the results I 

 should expect as if I had tried them. 



" Count a large number of words in 

 Herodotus — say all the first book — and 

 count all the letters; divide the second 

 numbers by the first, giving the average 

 number of letters to a word in that 

 hook. 



" Do the same with the second book. 

 I should expect a very close approxi- 

 mation. If Book I. gave 5.624 letters 

 per word, it w r ould not surprise me if 

 Book II. gave 5.619. I judge by other 

 things. 



" But I should not wonder if the same 

 result applied to two books of Thucy- 

 dides gave, say, 5.713 and 5.728. That 

 is to say, I should expect the slight 

 differences between one writer and an- 

 other to be well maintained against 

 each other, and very well agreeing 

 with themselves. If this fact were 

 established there, if St. Paul's Epistles 

 which begin with irav\os gave 5.428 and 

 the Hebrews gave 5.516, for instance, 

 I should feel quite sure that the Greek 

 of the Hebrews (passing no verdict on 

 whether Paul wrote in Hebrew and an- 

 other translated) was not from the 

 pen of Paul. 



" If scholars knew the law of aver- 

 ages as well as mathematicians, it 

 would be easy to raise a few hundred 

 pounds to try this experiment on a 

 grand scale. I would have Greek, 

 Latin and English tried, and I should 

 expect to find that one man writing on 

 two different subjects agrees more 

 nearly with himself than two different 

 men writing on the same subject. 

 Some of these days spurious writings 

 will be detected by this test. Mind, I 

 told you so. With kind regards to all 

 your family, I remain, dear Heald, 

 " Yours sincerely, 



A. De Morgan." 



Comment regarding this remarkable 

 anticipation of supposedly very modern 

 ideas seems superlluous. 



Raymond Pearl. 



