534 THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



(Part 10): "Smith returned presently and was reconciled to 

 his wife. When the bank would not restore him to its service, he 

 founded a similar financial institution on a large scale in a neigh- 

 boring city, and hundreds of people in the adjoining sections of the 

 country invested large sums of money in this institution, of which 

 Smith was the chief administrative officer. Jones, on the other hand, 

 who was still living well, duped several men into bad investments and 

 the loss of their property for his own gain, and as a result of these 

 misfortunes the reason of one person was affected and the life of another 

 was shortened." 



(No. 10) : "It seemed then, after all, that whatever might be the characters 

 of Smith and Jones in other respects, Smith was the more trustworthy man in 

 financial dealings, and therefore the judge was probably right and the jury 

 wrong at the trial." 



(Part 11): "Within a few years, however, Smith wrecked the 

 institution which he was administering, and thus reduced to poverty 

 many who had entrusted to it the savings of a lifetime. At the in- 

 vestigation he admitted that he had turned over hundreds of thousands 

 of dollars of its assets to doubtful or fictitious business enterprises; 

 and another great block of its funds had been simply abstracted, for 

 what purpose he would not say. He was condemned to a term in 

 prison " 



Conclusions 1, 2, 5, 7, 8, 9, and 10 in this case illustrate prob- 

 ability in the inferior form of a mere balancing of two groups of oppos- 

 ing reasons pro and con. To a large extent the two groups continue 

 in play throughout all these conclusions. The subtraction of one 

 feature here or the addition of another there, now to the advantage 

 of one side and again to the advantage of the other, casts the balance 

 of probability continually back and forth. The inferiority of this 

 form of probability may be recognized from the fact that there will 

 not necessarily be unanimity concerning the conclusions. In the 

 superior form of probability illustrated in Cases 1 to 11, where the 

 conclusions are fixed by the ratio of the number of occurrences of the 

 event to the total number of occasions in the course of experience, 

 there is practically no room for disagreement. Thus, in Case 5, if a 

 baby is upset in a railway coach, similar instances establish as a mat- 

 ter of actual experience and not mere opinion that the baby will 

 probably be crying, or failing that, dead or unconscious. Or again, 

 in Case 9, if a man pays 12s. 6d. for a recent publication, similar 

 instances establish as a matter of actual experience that 12s. 6d. is 

 probably the ordinary retail price of the book; but in weighing a 

 variety of reasons against each other, there is no possibility of striking 

 an exact or conservative ratio from experience. The weight to be 



