216 MEMOIR OF AUGUSTUS DE MORGAN. 



1851. that a little expenditure of money would settle questions 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 look. 



Do the same with the second book. I should expect a very 

 close approximation. If Book I. gave 5 - 624 letters per word, it 

 would not surprise me if Book IT. gave 5*619. I judge by other 

 things. 



But I should not wonder if the same result applied to two 

 books of Thucydides gave, say 5713 and 5728. That is to say, 

 I should expect the slight differences between one writer and 

 another 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 ITcuAos 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 another translated) was not from the pen of 

 Paul. 



If scholars knew the law of averages as well as mathema- 

 ticians, 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. 



To Sir John Herschel. 



7 Camden Street, Aug. 29, 1852. 



1852. MY DEAR SIR JOHN, . . . Induction seems to lead to the 



conclusion that an astronomer who is Master of the Mint gets 

 some odd mode of chronology. The first cut a great piece off 

 the beginning, the second will cut a great piece off the end, and 

 doom us all to be squabashed in 1865. The next, I suppose, 

 will cut a great piece out of the middle, which will be the most 



