March 11, 1887.] 



SCIEJS'CE. 



239 



which does not materially change from year to 

 year during his productive period ; that, in the 

 use of that vocabulary in composition, personal 

 peculiarities in the construction of sentences will, 

 in the long-run, recur with such regularity that 

 short words, long words, and words of medium 

 length, will occur with definite relative fre- 

 quencies. 



The first assumption will, perhaps, be admitted 

 in a general way, without debate. It is easily 



in their curves, and consequently as a severe test 

 of the method, two contemporaneous novelists, 

 Dickens and Thackeray, were selected for the first 

 examination. The operation consisted simply in 

 counting the number of letters in every word, and 

 recording the number of words of one letter, two 

 letters, three letters, etc. The count began in 

 both cases at the beginning of the volume, and, 

 after a few thousand words had been counted in 

 order, the book was opened at random near the 



Fig. 3. —Two consecutive gkoups, of one thousand words each, from 'Vanity fair. 

 SHOW sensibly the same average word-lengths. 



These groups 



seen that to prove or disprove the second will re- 

 quire the expenditure of an enormous amount of 

 labor. The following results are offered as a 

 means of properly exhibiting the method, and 

 as evidence, in some degree at least, of its real 

 value. 



It is important, first, to determine to what ex- 

 tent an author may be said to agree with himself ; 

 and, second, to what extent does he differ from 

 others. 



As an instance in which two writers might 

 well be expected to greatly resemble each other 



middle, and the count continued. In no case was 

 any personal choice exercised, except that both 

 counts began with the first chapter. Words were 

 counted always in groups of one thousand. The 

 graphic display of the result was made by the 

 common method of rectangular co-ordinates, 

 using the number of letters in a word as an 

 abscissa, and the corresponding number of such 

 words in a thousand as an ordinate. As an illus- 

 tration, the first one thousand words counted from 

 ' Oliver Twist ' may be cited ; they were as fol- 

 lows : — 



