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JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. Biometrika Trust is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Biometrika. SUMMARY Canonical components of shape, discriminant functions of shape and principal components of shape are defined from log shape vectors. Several results relate these components to the corresponding components of log measurement and to a particular size variable referred to as residual log size. The latter variable accounts for the variation which cannot be attributed to shape. Canonical components of shape are determined for Anderson's data for three species of iris, as well as for data on red-winged blackbirds in Florida. While the three iris species differ strongly in shape as well as in size, male and female blackbirds differ strongly in size but not much in shape. Principal components of shape are illustrated with the blackbird data and the most constant principal component is found to be interesting.

The time to absorption from the set T of transient states of a Markov chain may be sufficiently long for the probability distribution over T to settle down in some sense to a “quasi-stationary” distribution. Various analogues of the stationary distribution of an irreducible chain are suggested and compared. The reverse process of an absorbing chain is found to be relevant.

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