CHARACTERISTIC CURVES OF COMPOSITION. 143 



Table IV. 



Here not only are five thousand words sufficient to indicate that 

 the invariable curves for the two kinds of writing differ essentially, but 

 the number of four-letter words alone in any single thousand seems to 

 characterize the drama from the essay. 



It seemed hardly necessary to augment these data which may seem 

 to the reader more than adequate 

 to establish the multiplicity of the 

 so-called characteristic curves of 

 an author. Still I ventured an- 

 other test. Suppose several five- 

 thousand word-curves from differ- 

 ent dramatic works of an author 

 were constructed, and again sev- 

 eral five-thousand word-curves of 

 various other prose productions as 

 criticism or history by the same 

 author. Suppose it were found 

 that each set of curves agrees in 

 the main, but differ, in essential 



respects, from all the curves of the other set, could this be interpreted 

 otherwise than that the nature of the composition is the determining 

 factor of the curves? With this thought in mind, I tabulated four 

 additional groups of five thousand words each from Goethe, two groups 

 each taken from single works, the other two groups made up of single 

 thousands from each of ten different productions. These together 

 with the five thousand averages previously obtained from the 'Burger- 

 general' and 'Literatur Eecensionen' (B), are given in Table V., and 

 the corresponding word-curves are given in Fig. 18. Fig. 19 shows the 

 two curves which result if the entire fifteen thousand words are taken 



Fig. 14. Two 5,000 Word-curves from 

 Goldsmith. (Table III.) (A) Drama' She 

 Stoops to Conquer, ' (B) Essay ' Present State 

 of Polite Learning in Europe.' 



