PROF. HUXLEY AND THE SWINE-MIRACLE. 521 



2. Even if it had been relaxed as public law, yet those tradi- 

 tionally bound to it would not have been released from the moral 

 obligation of obedience, and all the particulars go to show that 

 the keepers of the swine were thus bound. 



3. In the enforcement of a law which bound the conscience, 

 our Lord had an authority such as does not belong to the private 

 individual. 



4. That the Gadarenes should have deprecated any recurrence 

 of this interference with unlawful gains, is no more wonderful 

 than that the population of the maritime counties of Great Britain 

 should, in the days of our protective tariff, have been favorable to 

 smuggling, and should even have resented, as they did, the inter- 

 ference of conscientious clergymen whose duty it was to denounce 

 the practice. 



5. That they should have done no more than ask for our Sav- 

 iour's departure, affords of itself the strongest presumption that 

 the action in which He co-operated, and which was certainly det- 

 rimental, was not illegal. 



I submit these observations upon an historical subject, compli- 

 cated by several difficulties, with all respect to those who differ 

 from me. I do not deny that the population of Decapolis was in 

 some sense a mixed population, partially resembling that of Sa- 

 maria.* But to suppose the swineherds to have been punished 

 by Christ for pursuing a calling which to them was an innocent 

 one, is to run counter to every law of reasonable historic inter- 

 pretation. I will not assume that I have even now exhausted the 

 subject, though I have not knowingly omitted anything mate- 

 rial. But Prof. Huxley is so well pleased with his own conten- 

 tions, that he thinks the occasion one suitable for pointing out 

 the intellectual superiority to which he has been led up by scien- 

 tific training. I believe that I have overthrown every one of 

 them ; but I do not think the achievement such as would war- 

 rant my concluding by paying myself a compliment. Nineteenth 

 Century. 



Mr. Francis Galton exhibited at a recent meeting of the Anthropological In- 

 stitute a number of impressions of the bulbs of the thumb and fingers of human 

 hands, showing the curves of the papillary ridges on the skin. These impressions 

 are an unfailing mark of the identity of a person, since they do not vary from youth 

 to age, and are different in different individuals. Impressions of the thumb formed 

 a kind of oath or signature among the Chinese, but were not used by them as proofs 

 of identity. Sir W. J. Herschel, when in the Bengal civil service, introduced the 

 practice of imprinting finger-marks as a check on personation. In Mr. Galton's 

 impressions, which were taken from more than two thousand persons, typical 

 forms can be discerned and traced, of which the individual forms are mere varie- 

 ties. "Wide departures from the typical forms are very rare. 



* Bell. Jud., iii, 3, 2. 

 vol. xxxix. 36 



