L. A. Sherman, 



not fail to misrepresent the authors and period in hand. But 

 all such considerations, until some sort of foothold might be 

 reached, were disregarded ; a period as found was taken as a 

 period, no matter if beginning with a wJiicJi or wJien, and 

 ending without principal verb. The summaries obtained were 

 as follows : — 



Average 500 periods 



36.83 



The average of these results was found to be 50.14 words. 

 This was then to be taken tentatively as an expression for the 

 length of the English sentence down to Elizabethan times. 



In selecting a like group from among modern authors, I 

 took an example of the most diffuse and of the most con- 

 densed or laconic style that I could find by simple inspection, 

 with three writers of standard but diverse excellence between. 

 De Quincey, Macaulay, Channing, Emerson, and Bartol were 

 the five names. The results from each author, given in com- 

 plete hundreds to show the range and variation of sentence 

 lengths and structures, were these : — 



338 



