The next contribution to the stylistic method came from a scholar who had little sympathy with it, but whose view of Plato's philosophical development was threatened by its findings, which he sought to counteract in a series of articles. The first of these comprised three separate inquiries: an investigation to show that Plato's style did not develop uniformly (la); an examination of the author's vocabulary to determine the chronological order of his works, especially the position of the Phdr. and Theaet. (Ib); a similar investigation, but with a number of Lutoslawski's criteria for material (Ic). The second was a criticism of Lutoslawski's conclusions and so, indirectly, of most earlier research. The third, which appeared a year after the first two, was intended as an improved interpretation of the material which he had presented in the first article (Ib). In view of this no purpose would be served by reproducing his original interpretation, and in the following account it is replaced by the version he himself preferred.

For his first investigation (Ia) Natorp chose Plato's vocabulary; using Ast's Lexicon he compiled statistics of

1. (1) words peculiar to each dialogue (Table 16.1, series i). His figures were generally higher than Campbell's, because he took into account, as Campbell probably did not, words which apart from one of the genuine dialogues occurred only in dubious or unauthentic works. Which these were he did not say, but they almost certainly included works now regarded as genuine, such as Lys., Menex., Hipp. Mi., Ion;

2. […]