422 H. B. Dewing, 
may be judged; if his clausule show no more than 80 regular 
cases out of every 100, he can not be said to observe any law, 
because there must be at least 80 regular from mere accident. 
This result would be a welcome help in the study of the cursus if 
it were convincing, but it can not be accepted as the correct one; 
in the first place, the monosyllables were reckoned with only in 
clausule, while the polysyllabic words throughout the sentence 
were included in the computation; in the second place, all cases 
with 3 or 5 syllables in arsi are counted on the regular side. This 
will be shown later to be absolutely wrong. 
Litzica seeks a second means of detecting the presence of the 
accentual cursus by a comparison by statistics of the percentage 
of regular forms found in classic writers with that found in those | 
writers in which the law seems to be operative. Tests in different 
writers are found to give the following result: Lysias 73 °/) regular; 
Demosthenes 69°/) regular; Polybius 85°/) regular; Dionysius of 
Halicarnassus 82°/) regular; Josephus 84 °/) regular; Plutarch 85 °/) 
regular; Lucian 75°/, regular; Aelius Aristides 80°/) regular. All 
these writers show a clear majority of cases regular. Tests are 
also made of Greek later than the Byzantine period as follows: 
Korais, Autobiography 88 °/, regular ; Georgios Mistriotes, President’s 
speech, 1891, 87°/, regular; in the leading article of the newspaper 
Acropolis, April 1, 1896, 86 °/) regular. These figures taken together 
show that the Greek language of every period contained many 
more clausulz of Meyer’s regular forms than of the irregular forms. 
This method of defining the cursus is surely the right one, but 
Litzica fails again in that he consistently counts regular all those 
cases in which 3 or 5 syllables stand in arsi. Then there follows 
an account of tests made in 44 different Greek writers from the 
fourth to the fifteenth century, with a table showing the relative 
standing of all the writers tested according to their tolerance of 
irregularity in the application of the law. Three classes of writers 
are now distinguished: (1) those who followed the law closely, 
allowing 5 °/) or less of irregularity—18 writers; (2) a middle class 
who allowed between 5°/) and 10°/) of irregularity—3 writers; (3) 
those who allow more than 10°/) of irregularity are considered as 
knowing nothing of a cursus law—23 writers. 
This classification shows about half the writers tested to be 
outside the influence of Meyer’s law. This fact leads Litzica to 
protest against Meyer’s position that there is any law existent. 
The law, he maintains, is not universal in that it does not control 
all the writers of the period, nor is it universal in any single 
