1622 NO TES SKEWNESS AND KURTOSIS AS CRITERIA OF NORMALITY IN OBSERVED FREQUENCY DISTRIBUTIONS 1

Moment measures are widely used to describe the properties of samples. The third and fourth nmments, descriptors of skewness and kurtosis, may, be used to test the hypothesis that the sample came from a normal distribution. This paper uses a Monte Carlo method to devise tables for this purpose. The approach involves repeated sampling from a normal population to determine percentage points of the distribution ofthe estimators of skewness and kurtosis. The tables are arranged to indicate the limiting values of skewness and kurtosis that are acceptable without rejecting the hypothesis that the population is normal. I NTRODUCTION Moment measures were first used in the study of sediments in the 1920's (Van Orstrand, 1924 Hatch and Choate, 1929). Since then many writers have advocated the use of moment measures in virtually all branches of geology. For the most part, these measures are used for describing sample distributions. The first an