Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 February 2010
In Section 1 below I describe two measures of the complexity of a binary relation. J The theorem says that these two measures never disagree very much. Both measures of complexity arose in connection with Saharon Shelah's notion [5] of a stable firstt order theory; Shelah showed in effect that one measure is finite, if, and only if, the other is finite too. This follows trivially from the theorem below. I confess my main aim was not to get the extra information which the theorem provides, but to eliminate Shelah's use of uncountable cardinals, which seemed strangely heavy machinery for proving a purely finitary result. Section 2 below explains the modeltheoretic setting.