38 Human Levitation. (January, 
that twentieth spadeful, on this may depend whether a slug 
is turned up or not; on the slug may depend a young 
swallow’s dinner who is feeble, and on this may depend 
whether he shall follow his colony, and reach Africa; but 
on this fledgling’s arrival or non-arrival may depend whether 
a certain insect shall serve him for supper, or be left to lay 
a million eggs, which, in that case, will next month be each 
a locust laying a million more; and on this billion of locusts 
and their progeny may depend whether at Christmas all 
Ashantee and three Senegambias of forest shall be green as 
Eden or a leafless wilderness, and its mean temperature 
100 or only 70° ; and on whether such an area be the hottest 
or coolest portion of the planet’s intertropical lands, may 
well depend, by Dr. Tyndall’s own showing, the winds and 
drought or wet of a season, over half Europe or the whole. 
It behoved him, then, to be quite sure about that gardener’s 
last spadeful, and all such causes, which yet he wholly 
leaves out of account! The weather of large districts may 
as plainly be still more quickly affected by events that acts 
of man or beast unconsciously bring about—as forest fires ; 
avalanches that a goat may set rolling; dykes burst, and 
Zuyder Zees refilled for ages by the burrowing of a rat; 
shoals of herrings or of whales that by turning right or 
left may make a month’s difference in the break-up and 
drifting to us of half a year’s polar ice. Here we confine 
ourselves to visible nature and known forces. Let the 
insane assumption be granted that there is no invisible 
nature, nor aught unknown, and even so, He that owns and 
actuates the cattle on a thousand hills, might thus plainly, 
by only one of their hoofs, make the winds his ministers, 
and flames of fire his messengers. 
The flood of paradox thus accumulating from the crudities 
of teachers of the most different schools makes all we have 
said, and more definition, necessary for protection, ere one 
can touch matters even distantly bearing on these. The 
writer hopes, therefore, he will be understood to have no 
knowledge as to the limits of the ‘naturally possible and 
impossible ;” and lacking this, cr any ground for the conceit 
of two such differentiated powers as “‘ nature and God,” he 
can only understand by “‘nature”’ the course of whatever has 
happened ; and thus can make no distin¢tion between saying 
a thing happened, or that God did it, and saying it is 
natural. ‘‘If the dead rise not, then is Christ not risen,” 
and he who thus wrote, we suppose, would have added, if 
relevant, “‘and if the living are never born of virgins, then 
was Christ not so.” Before a man can know this to be 
