1875.] Human Levitation. 33 
was there a thousandth of this difference; or, if you please, 
always a difference in the contrary direction,” so that the 
human and brute soul (or the male and female human, or 
the European and the negro) should be so widely different 
physically as for the one to possess gravity and the other 
levity : would there, in any of these cases, be any record of 
experiment to this hour that could negative the statement ? 
If not, then who, the theologian or the scientists, are the 
rasher dogmatists, er the more unphilesophical ? 
Surely Faraday had done all his teaching before that 
wonderfully unlucky dictum, that investigators ought to 
approach an inquiry with ‘“ preliminary notions of the natu- 
rally possible and impossible.” It amounts to this, that 
before investigating whether nature contains x, you ought 
to know what nature does and does net contain. A tolerable 
attainment truly. The only man we have known, and 
perhaps the first, to claim this sublimity of knowledge, 
was Daubeny, who, in the stir raised by Colenso’s denial 
of Noah’s story, or, rather, the saying of Christ about 
“the day that Noé entered the ark, and the flood came and 
took them all away,” deigned to assure the clergy (in their 
paper ‘“‘The Guardian”’), and, apparently, to their satis- 
faction, that ‘‘nature evidently” [to botanical professors] 
“‘contains no forces competent to produce” the described 
catastrophe. Faraday’s requirement then is even exceeded ; 
here is knowledge not only of what the universe contains, 
and does not contain, but of what it did or did not many 
centuries ago! But we are wrong in calling his knowledge 
unparalleled. Here is a perfect parallel elicited by the 
very same subject, “‘ The Noaic Deluge,” by the Rev.'S. 
Lucas, F.G.S., a writer just as certain (from Geology) that 
such deluge happened, as Colenso and Daubeny that it did 
not. At page 2 of this little book, Mr. Lucas says, ‘‘ We 
run no risk of contradiction when we affirm that nothing at 
the command of mere natural law, or of mere material 
force, could produce it.” He knows, then, what of law and 
of material force universal nature commands—nay, what it 
did and did not command at a certain past epoch; and, 
more, knows this so well as to ‘‘run no risk of contra- 
diction” in affirming it! He proceeds, “‘ No mere natural 
forces [mere !], however gigantic and powerful, could break 
up all the fountains of the great deep, and open the windows 
of heaven: consequently, these events must be deemed 
miraculous,” &c. Why is it that no Englishman of this 
generation seems ever to touch either of these questions, 
what is natural, and what is miraculous, without deeming 
VOL. V. (N.S.) . F 
