410 Credibility of Extraordinary Stories, [CHAP. xvn. 



supposing a lottery with a prize and blanks, or a bag of balls 

 of two colours only, the witness knowing that there are only 

 two, or at any rate being confined to naming one or other of 

 them. If they are black and white, and he errs when black 

 is drawn, he must say white. The reason for the promi 

 nence assigned to examples of this class is, probably, that 

 they correspond to the very important case of verdicts of 

 juries ; juries being supposed to have nothing else to do than 

 to say guilty or not guilty. 



On the other hand, the testimony may take the form of a 

 more original statement or piece of information. Instead of 

 saying, Did A happen ? we may ask, What happened ? Here 

 if the witness speaks truth he must be supposed, as before, 

 to have but one way of doing so ; for the occurrence of some 

 specific event was of course contemplated. But if he errs he 

 has many ways of going wrong, possibly an infinite number. 

 Ordinarily however his possible false statements are assumed 

 to be limited in number, as must generally be more or less 

 the result in practice. This case is represented numerically 

 by supposing the balls in the bag not to be of two colours 

 only, but to be all distinct from each other; say by their 

 being all numbered successively. It may of course be ob 

 jected that a large number of the statements that are made 

 in the world are not in any way answers to questions, either 

 of the alternative or of the open kind. For instance, a man 

 simply asserts that he has drawn the seven of spades from a 

 pack of cards ; and we do not know perhaps whether he had 

 been asked Has that card been drawn ? or What card has 

 been drawn? or indeed whether he had been asked anything 

 at all. Still more might this be so in the case of any ordi 

 nary historical statement. 



This objection is quite to the point, and must be recog 

 nized as constituting an additional difficulty. All that we 





