2 R. E. M or its 



investigator. There is a sentence-rhythm, as it has been called 

 by its discoverer, which is the hidden mark, the cipher, the cryp- 

 togram, with which each author unconsciously endows the prog- 

 eny of his pen. Measured, it yields a number, an author-constant, 

 corresponding to the wave-length of this rhythm. And just as 

 the wave-length of standard musical tones has been shortened 

 in the course of time,^ so the author-constant has gradually di- 

 minished from the beginning of English literature to the present 

 day. 



Such is a brief paraphrase of a theory set forth at some length 

 by Professor L. A. Sherman' in two articles published in 1892 

 and 1894 respectively. In these, as in a later article by G. W. 

 Gerwig,^ results are announced and tentative statements are 

 made which lead one to infer that English prose writers conform 

 to sentence-instinct, which has all the force of a positive law in 

 controlling their written utterances. After tabulating the sen- 

 tence-lengths* measured in words of from 500 to 800 consecu- 

 tive sentences from each of the authors De Quincey, Macaulay, 

 Channing, Emerson, and Bartol, Professor Sherman remarks: 

 "Now that the number of words in consecutive sentences was 

 definitely exhibited, strange facts and features of style were in- 

 dicated or suggested. The length of one sentence, it was shown, 

 might be echoed unconsciously into the next, as notably in Ma- 

 caulay's groups of seventeens. . . . But the really remark- 

 able thing was the apparently constant sentence-average in the 

 respective authors. Could it be possible that stylists, as eminent 

 and practiced as these, are subject to a rigid rhytJmiic law, from 



1 Ellis, an English physicist, hns shown that the concert C4 normal tone 

 has reduced its wave-length (in air) from 2.33 to 1.99 feet in the course of 

 130 years. 



^ Some Observations upon the Sentence-Lens^th in English Prose, Univer- 

 sity Studies, Lincoln, Neb., vol. I, no. 2, p. 119. 



On Certaiti Facts and Principles in the Development of Form in Litera- 

 ture, Ibid., vol. I, no. 4, p. 337. 



^On the Decrease of Predication and of Sentence Weight in English Prose, 

 Ib!d.,\o\. II, no. 1, p. 17. 



*The study of s-ntence-lengths was suggested by T. C. Mendenhall in 

 his article on The Characteristic Curies of Composition, in Science, March 

 11, 1887, who in turn credits August DeMorgan, the well-known mathema- 

 tician, with the priority of the thought of applying numerical analysis to the 

 study of literary style. 



230 



