1875.] Human Levitation. 37 
whether the physical modus of an occurrence, say, of the 
fish getting the coin into its mouth, or of the great deep 
being broken up, and mankind swept off ‘‘in the day Noé 
entered the ark,” is or is not satisfactorily clear to Mr. A. or 
B., to Daubeny or Lucas. The difference, then, between 
miracle and non-miracle would be purely subjective, and 
different for any two men existing, or that ever will exist. 
Thus, to Mr. Lucas, who finds from Geology that the deluge 
happened, but ‘‘ knows” the universe to contain no ‘“‘ mere 
natural law” that could effect it, this event would be a 
miracle; while to us, who can find in no part of either its 
legend or relics the smallest departure from the laws even 
now known of the visible part of nature, and are driven to 
credit such legend by its minute correspondence in detail 
with all the latest discoveries in nature, it would be no 
miracle ! 
In the stifling dust raised around all these matters since 
Dr. Newman’s paradox, Professor Tyndall has made the 
true remark that there can be no prayer-granting without 
miracle, or, rather, the miraculous element. If unseason- 
able weather changes, after prayer for ‘‘ seasonable”” weather 
(the only prayer thereon ever sanctioned by the church), 
into seasonable, this implies the miraculous, but no more 
of the unphysical than Peter’s fish. Dr. Tyndall, however, 
first ignoring the church’s important adjective, compared 
this to a prayer that an eclipse might be delayed; as if such 
delay would be a thing ‘‘seasonable.” He then lays down 
as ‘science’ the gratuitous paradox that winds and clouds 
of to-morrow may be, like the planetary motions, pre-deter- ° 
mined by only brute cosmic forces ; which, if as true as it is 
demonstrably false, would not even then give the fixity he 
wants, as the planetary system itself is invaded at any 
moment by unknowable comets and meteors, and solar 
radiation hourly altered by storms of the photosphere. He 
requires, at the outset of his attack, all the present century’s 
discoveries to be ignored. But let us grant him a solar 
system as simple as medizval ignorance ever fancied ; this 
would not help him. Yonder is a gardener, who may dig 
twenty more spadefuls before dinner, or perhaps only nine- 
teen. Is Dr. Tyndall prepared to prove that whether they 
shall be twenty or nineteen is already as determined, by laws 
of brute matter, as the next transit of Venus? If not, he 
should have warned readers that the whole prayer argument 
was a mere jeu d’esprit, hanging on the assumption of this 
extreme necessarianism. Relax one stitch thereof, and the 
whole fabric falls, thus :—If there be any uncertainty about 
