Capture-recapture and unseen-species estimation

Most lenses in this collection test what survives. This one is different: it estimates what is gone, and puts an actual number on it. This page gathers conjectures built on a trick ecologists use to count fish they never see -- tag one sample, catch a second sample later, and the overlap between the two tells you the total population -- since extended by wildlife statisticians into a method that estimates unseen species purely from how many show up exactly once. Applied to lost literature, two independent anthologies that happen to quote the same otherwise-vanished work count as a "recapture," and the share of works quoted only once, ever, becomes a real estimate of how much never got quoted at all.

The singleton census and Most of Sanskrit literature is two copies from extinction both build directly on the singleton-count method, using how many works are attested exactly once to estimate the size of the vanished whole. Capture-recapture in the anthologies applies the overlap method literally, comparing which lost works two independent anthologies both happen to quote. Taxpayers leave two sherds and Water chits count the fort extend the same logic to physical objects rather than texts -- broken pottery receipts, water-ration chits -- using duplicate finds to estimate how many originals must once have existed.