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POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



cause for surprise that Shaler's 'Armada Days,' composed 'in the spirit 

 and style of the Elizabethan Age, ' should yield a word-curve resembling 

 that of Shakespeare's plays. 



Seeing that the assumption that word-curves vary according to the 

 composition employed accounts for nearly everything which had been 

 attributed to personal characteristics of the authors, and that it also 

 explains so much which is inexplicable on the opposite assumption, T 



Fig. 4. Two 5,000 Word-curves (after Fig. 5. Three 10,000 Word-curves of 



Mendenhall) from John Stuart Mill. (A) Fiction (after Mendenhall). (^1) Dickens's 

 ' Political Economy,' (B) ' Essay on Liberty.' 'Oliver Twist,' (B) Thackeray's ' Vanity Fair,* 



(C) Dickens's 'Christmas Carol.' 



sought for a way to test it. But how ? According to Dr. Mendenhall, 

 'no one has written enough in two or three different styles, as prose, 

 poetry, history, essay, drama, etc., to produce normal characteristic 

 diagrams.' This, if true, would exclude any positive test of our 

 hypothesis, but a moment's reflection convinced me that the assump- 

 tion is entirely unwarranted. Goethe has among his prose works alone, 

 volumes each of drama, biography, fiction, travel, science, criticism 

 and correspondence. Schiller, too, has written far to exceed 100,000 

 words each of prose, drama and history. And what about Voltaire with 

 his seven volumes of drama, eleven of history, seven of essays, ten of 

 philosophy and eighteen of correspondence, besides several others of 

 poetry, romance, science and commentaries ; or George Sand or Lamar- 

 tine with their libraries of books written in various forms of compo- 

 sition ? Our own Dryden, also, has written of essays and prose dramas 

 each more than sufficient to furnish a normal word-curve from each. 



Here then was sufficient material to demonstrate the truth or 

 falsity of our hypothesis, if only means could be found to carry out the 

 work. Dr. Mendenhall convinced himself that no less than 100,000 

 words are necessary to yield an invariable curve, and it would evi- 

 dently require several such curves to furnish any safe ground for 

 induction. But the examination of several hundred thousand words, 

 allowing but two hours for the tabulation and classification per thou- 

 sand, would require a greater sacrifice of time than other duties would 



