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guages as well as the English. My aim was to discover a 
number of the most frequently occurring combinations, 
large enough to make a considerable gain in composition 
and yet not so large as to render the printer’s case incon- 
venient or to overtax his memory. After some preliminary 
trials, twenty-five samples of English composition were 
ultimately selected from the following classes of literature : 
current literature, newspapers, standard authors, scientific 
works, legal works, modern poetry, old English prose, old 
English and burlesque poetry. Three of each class except 
the last were fairly selected, and 10,000 characters (or 250,000 
in all) were taken from each for the sake of easy compari- 
son. The samples were then subjected to an “exhaustive 
analysis,” a table being made of 26 lines and 26 columns, 
one for each letter of the alphabet, and in each space were 
placed the number of times the letter at the left of the line 
immediately preceded the letter at the top of the column. 
Thus the word column would give the combinations co, ol, 
In, um, and mn. The first and last letters of a word indeed 
can appear but once, while the others appear twice, but the 
table gives a correct idea how many times two letters are 
found in conjunction in a sample of 10,000 characters. 
The next step was to select the best, and then recur to 
the text and carefully trace out how far those combinations 
which appear the best are injured by other combinations. 
For instance, in the word are, shall we take ar or re ? Both 
are valuable, and it is a question for another investigation 
whether the whole word should not be taken. 
To complete this investigation certain tables called “ glos- 
saries” have been formed which show how many times each 
word is repeated in the whole of the samples and in each 
thousand characters. These' glossaries have been printed in 
an octavo volume of 511 pages, and it is surprising to find 
how many words occur but once in samples which average 
about 2,000 words, and contain from 500 to 900 different 
