March 11, 1887.) 



SCIENCE. 



245 



and would be a much closer approximation to the 

 normal characteristic curve of Dickens. 



It is hardly necessary to say that the method is 

 not necessarily confined to the analysis of a com- 

 position by means of its mean word-length : it 

 may equally well be applied to the study of syl- 

 lables, of words in sentences, and in various other 

 ways. The results thus far obtained from its ap- 

 plication would appear to justify the claim that it 

 is worthy of a thorough test through which the 



Many interesting applications of the process 

 will suggest themselves to every reader ; the most 

 notable, of course, being the attempt to solve 

 questions of disputed authorship, such as exist in 

 reference to the letters of Junius, the plays of 

 Shakspeare, and other less widely known ex- 

 amples. It might also be utilized in comparative 

 language studies, in tracing the growth of a lan- 

 guage, in studying the growth of the vocabulary 

 from childhood to manhood, and in other direc- 



Fig. 9. — Curve of five thousand words from Mill's 'Essay on liberty. 



validity of its assumptions might be proved or 

 disproved. Its principal merits are, that it offers 

 a means of investigating and displaying the mere 

 mechanism of composition, and that it is purely 

 mechanical in its application. In virtue of the 

 first, it might reveal characteristics which a writer 

 would make no attempt to conceal, being himself 

 unaware of their existence ; and, of the second, 

 the conclusions reached through its use would be 

 independent of personal bias, the work of one 

 person in the study of an author being at once 

 comparable with that of any other. 



tions too numerous to be catalogue 1. An illus- 

 tration of its application to another language is 

 shown in the analysis of more than five thousand 

 words in Caesar's ' Commentaries,' already referred 

 to, which is represented in fig. 13. The curve 

 shows a relatively large use of long words, and 

 its peculiar feature is the evident indication of 

 two maximum ordinates nearly equal to each 

 other. 



From the examinations thus far made, I am 

 convinced that one hundred thousand woids will 

 be necessary and sufficient to furnish the charac- 



