806 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



nal antecedence and consequence. " Suppose," he said, that " every 

 Englishman, by invoking St. Thomas of Canterbury, could put his 

 hand into the fire without injury. Why, the very fact, that in order 

 to avoid injury he must invoke the saint's name, would ever keep fresh 

 and firm in his mind the conviction that fire does naturally burn. 

 He would therefore as unquestioningly in all his physical researches 

 assume this to be the natural property of fire as though God had never 

 wrought a miracle at all. In fact, from the very circumstances of the 

 case, it is always one of the most indubitable laws of Nature which a 

 miracle overrides, and those who wish most to magnify the miracle 

 are led by that very fact to dwell with special urgency on the other- 

 wise universal prevalence of the law." There was a short pause when 

 Dr. Ward had concluded his paper, which was soon ended by Professor 

 Huxley, who broke off short in a very graphic sketch he had been mak- 

 ing on his sheet of foolscap as he listened. 



Dr. Ward, said Professor Huxley, had told us with perfect truth 

 that the uniformity of Nature was only held, by even the most thor- 

 oughgoing of clear-minded physicists, as a fruitful working hypothesis, 

 the assumption of which had led to a vast number of discoveries, 

 which could not have been effected without it. If they could not as- 

 sume that under heat the vapor of water would expand one day as it 

 had expanded the previous day, no locomotive would be of any use ; 

 if they could not assume that under certain given conditions the ma- 

 jority of seeds put into the ground would spring up and reproduce 

 similar seed, no fields would be sown and no harvest would be reaped. 

 In innumerable cases where the same antecedents had apparently not 

 been followed by the same consequents, thinking men had taken for 

 granted that they must have been mistaken in supposing the ante- 

 cedents to be the same, and had found that they were right, and that 

 the difference in the antecedents had really been followed by the dif- 

 ference in the consequents. He, for his part, should not object at all 

 to examine into any presumptive case of miracle sufficiently strong to 

 prove that in a substantial number of cases Englishmen had been ena- 

 bled to thrust their hands into the fire without injury, by adopting so 

 simple a safeguard as calling on St. Thomas of Canterbury. But the 

 truth was, that asserted miracles were too sparse and rare, and too 

 uniformly accompanied by indications of either gross credulity or bad 

 faith, to furnish an investigator jealous of his time, and not able to 

 waste his strength on futile inquiries, with a sufficient basis for inves- 

 tigation. Men of science were too busy in their fruitful vocation to 

 hunt up the true explanation of cases of arrested miracle, complicated 

 as they generally were with all sorts of violent prepossessions and 

 confusing emotions. He, for his part, did not pretend that the physi- 

 cal uniformity of Nature could be absolutely proved. He was content 

 to know that his " working hypothesis " had been proved to be invalu- 

 able by the test of innumerable discoveries, which could never have 



