Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 63.djvu/540

536 it is conclusive evidence that the supposed author did not write the disputed work; if they are practically identical, the evidence is in favor of the supposed author, for it is highly improbable that two sets of three numbers each, taken at random, should happen to coincide,

Following this or some similar line of thought, Mr. Hildreth examined the prose in fifteen of Shakespeare's plays and of Bacon's 'Essays' and a portion of the 'New Atlantis.' To eliminate possible errors arising from careless or inconsistent punctuation, all the material was repunctuated according to modern principles, All inorganic and broken sentences were omitted. Then follow twelve pages of figures representing totals and specimen results, and then the summary.

The reader is left free to draw his own conclusion from these figures. The closing statement is that the numbers are not presented as proof conclusive, but only as contributory evidence in the controversy.

Without wishing to deny the general principle of sentence-rhythm, which, in honor of its discoverer, I shall refer to as the Sherman principle in rhetoric, I wish to point out certain limitations to this principle, which I think will invalidate the conclusion that must otherwise be drawn from the above summary. The Sherman principle has been established only for certain normal forms of composition, a fact which lias been overlooked in the statement of the principle, as well as in its applications. What has been shown is that a writer uses definite sentence proportions while writing in a certain form of composition; it has not been shown that he uses the same proportions when he employs essentially different forms of composition, such as drama and description, criticism and correspondence. It is almost obvious that the sentence proportions of a philosophic discourse must differ from those employed in light fiction or the drama, yet this fact is not only overlooked, but directly denied in Mr. Hildreth's statement of the Sherman principle. To compare the sentence structure of dramatic compositions with the sentence structure of a heavy dissertation or description is to compare the oral utterances of a person engaged in deep contemplation or in vivid imagination of some sublime object with the commonplace talk of the drawing-room or the vernacular of the marketplace. Quite as plausible would it seem to assert that a man's average gait in walking is the same whether he is out for pleasure, on business, to escape from danger, or on a long journey.