We obtain the following results. 1) Suppose that

and its first

derivatives

, are continuous functions with values in a normed linear vector space. We define a class of linear functionals and show that if a functional in the class is applied to

and vanishes for

but does not vanish for

, then the vectors

are linearly independent for each

in the domain of

. 2) If now

are mean-square continuous random processes such that

has a nonvanishing white-noise component, then the random variables

, are linearly independent. These results are shown to be related both in formulation and method of solution.