CHARACTERISTIC CURVES OF COMPOSITION. 139 



permit me to make. Indeed, Dr. Mendenhall found himself in the 

 same predicament, from which he was rescued by the generosity of a 

 private citizen, who supplied the salaries of two assistants for several 

 months during which the necessary data were collected. 



Then it occurred to me that though one hundred thousand words 

 may be necessary to yield an invariable curve, a much smaller number 

 might suffice to establish the existence of such a curve within certain 

 limits. If these limits for the curves of different forms of composition 

 from the same author turn out to be mutually exclusive, our hypothesis 

 would be established, though we had not examined a sufficiently large 

 number of words to determine the locus of the curves with accuracy. 

 Thus, possibly, the work necessary to test our hypothesis might reduce 

 itself to manageable proportions. 



The first author examined was Goethe. To eliminate as far as 

 possible the disturbing effect of unconscious bias, I decided to count 

 in word-groups of consecutive thousands, always beginning with the 

 first of the work. Quotations, footnotes, headings and, in the case 

 of dramas, stage-directions, etc., were uniformly omitted. These rules 

 were strictly adhered to in all the data which follow. Five groups of 

 one thousand words each were taken from each of Goethe's 'Biirger- 

 general,' and 'Literatur Eecensionen, ' (B). The results were tabu- 

 lated as follows : 



Table I. 



Each thousand words was now plotted separately and the result- 

 ing two sets of five curves compared (Fig. 6 and Fig. 7). These 

 results far exceeded my expectation. No curve of the one set could 

 possibly be mistaken for any curve of the other set. Three-letter 

 words, of which there were between 319 and 338 in each thousand of 

 the first set, were reduced to 250 to 268 per thousand in the second set; 



