242 



SCIENCE. 



[Vol. IX., No. 214 



should be found. This agreement is particularly 

 striking in words of eleven, twelve, and thirteen 

 letters, the numerical comparison of which is as 

 follows : — 



Number of letters 



Numtoer of words in Dickens 



Number of words in Thackeray. 



ists ; but I confess to considerable surprise on find- 

 ing from the very beginning, that although, on 

 the whole, this anticipation was realized, the word 

 which occurred most frequently was not the three- 

 letter word, as with both Dickens and Thackeray, 

 but the word of two letters. Indeed, the word of 

 two letters was not only relatively more frequent, 

 but absolutely ; that is to say, it occurred more 

 frequently in the composition of Mill than in that 

 of either of the novelists, and with great uniform- 



Fig. 6. —Two gkoups, of five thousand words each, from 'Vanity fair. 



This closeness to identity must be largely the re- 

 sult of accident, and it would not be likely to 

 repeat itself in another analysis. 



The writer next examined was John Stuart 

 Mill ; and to test the persistence of form in com- 

 positions belonging to different periods of the au- 

 thor's life, and upon different subjects, two groups 

 of five thousand words each were taken, — one 

 from his ' Political economy,' and the other from 

 his 'Essay on liberty.' It was anticij)ated, of 

 course, that words of greater length would occur 

 far more frequently than in the case of the novel- 



ity, as it was in excess in eaqh thousand of the 

 ten analyzed. The explanation is easy, and is to 

 be found in the liberal use of prepositions in sen- 

 tence-building. The proposed method of analysis 

 is designed to reveal any peculiarity of this kind, 

 and the exemplification of its power thus early in 

 the work was encouraging. 



Figs. 8 and 9 show the curves for five thousand 

 words from the ' Political economy ' and from the 

 'Essay on liberty.' It will be observed, that, 

 while they differ considerably, there is still, in a 

 general way, a striking resemblance, and that 



