At the risk of appearing ignorant why is the folowing true? o <- cbind(rep(1,3),rep(2,3),rep(3,3)) var(o) [,1] [,2] [,3] [1,] 0 0 0 [2,] 0 0 0 [3,] 0 0 0 and mean(o) [1] 2 How do I get mean to return an array similar to var? I would expect in the above example a vector of length 3 {1,2,3}. Thank you for your help. Kevin