Had this essay of Percy's been known to Lachmann's followers, many of the forced attempts at reconciling the Old English verse with a scheme that involved a fixed number of syllables in the line would not have been made. Lachmann himself, it must be remembered, admitted the two-beat scansion for Old Norse, Old Saxon, and Old English. Meanwhile other investigators were at work on independent lines. In 1844 A. Schmeller, the editor of the _Heliand_, formulated the law that, in the Teutonic languages, it is the force with which the different syllables are uttered that regulates the rhythm of the verse, and not the number or length of the syllables (which are of minor importance), and established the fact that this alliterative verse was not meant to be sung but to be recited.[40] He does not enter into the details of the rhythm of the verse, except by pointing out the two-beat cadence of each section. Somewhat later, W. Wackernagel[41] declared himself in favour of the two-beat theory for all Teutonic alliterative verse. In every hemistich of the verse there are according to Wackernagel two syllables with a grammatical or logical emphasis, and consequently a strong accent, the number of less strongly accented syllables not being fixed. The two-beat theory was again ably supported by F. Vetter[42] and by K. Hildebrand, who approached the subject by a study of the Old Norse alliterative verse,[43] and by M. Rieger in his instructive essay on Old Saxon and Old English versification.[44] In this essay Rieger pointed out the rules prevailing in the poetry of those two closely related Teutonic nations, dealt with the distribution and quality of the alliteration, the relation of the alliteration to the noun, adjective, and verb, and to the order of words, with the caesura and the close of the verse, and, finally, with the question of the accented syllables and the limits of the use of unaccented syllables.[45] Other scholars, as Horn, Ries, and Sievers, contributed further elucidations of the details of this metre on the basis of Rieger's researches.[46]