After a break in 1887 the following year produced three further works to sustain the growing interest in research into Plato's prose style. The subject of the first of these was πᾶς and its compounds; the results are contained in Tables 8.1 and 8.2 (pp. 42, 43). Walbe himself made no claim to have discovered the probable chronological sequence of the dialogues, but believed that his statistics were capable of throwing some light on the correct positions of certain works.

Directing his attention first to the use of σύμπας (including συνάπας), which he considered ‘particularly noteworthy’, he decided that the earliest group of works comprised those in which this word occurred only once or not at all, the middle one those in which it occurred between two and five times, while to the last period, where alone it could be called reasonably common, belonged Tim. 17, Crit. 5, Laws 85, Phil. 23, Soph. 23, Pol. 46. ‘This’, Walbe declared, ‘agrees so well with the results of both Dittenberger and Schanz that it now seems almost criminal to doubt that Soph., Pol., Phil., Tim., Crit. and Laws are the latest dialogues.’ This was confirmed by the fact that συνάπας occurs only in these six apart from two considered spurious, Hipp. Ma. and Ale. I., the reason being presumably that the more συνάπας was used the more it appeared to lose its force, and so a new form was needed stronger and more important than all the rest.

Having found a continuous increase in the use of συνάπας Walbe turned to examine ἄπας.