Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 63.djvu/546

542 It will be interesting to test this law on some specific work, not included in the table from which the law has been deduced. Macaulay's 'History of England' is the only larger work whose sentence dimensions have been determined with reasonable accuracy. Here S was found to be 34.2, and substituting this in our formula we find

which is nearly equal to the value 2.30 as determined by actually counting the finite verbs in 40,000 sentences.

There is, of course, no reason to infer that our formula will apply with equal accuracy to the sentence dimensions of every other work. Variations from it must occur. The only conclusion that is warranted is that when a reasonable number of works are selected whose predication frequency is nearly the same, and the average of these frequencies is taken, this average will bear a definite relation to the average of simple sentence ratios of the same works and that this relation is approximately expressed by our formula.