128 THE FOUNDATIONS OF ZOOLOGY 



The true believer may say, however, that while our finite, im- 

 perfect minds may be unable to deduce anything from homo- 

 geneity, in the absence of knowledge drawn from experience, the 

 outcome of the process must nevertheless be determinate. As it 

 has all come out of the primeval homogeneity, he says this must 

 have contained it all potentially. 



I am no philosopher, but this does not seem obvious or neces- 

 sary to me. Nature, as we know it, consists, in the main of per- 

 mutations and combinations. " I do not know," is one thing, and 

 " I do know not " is another, even if some fail to discriminate. 



" It is easy to perceive that the prodigious variety which ap- 

 pears,, both in the works of nature and in the acts of men, and 

 which constitutes the greatest part of the beauty of the universe, 

 is owing to the multitude of different ways in which its several 

 parts are mixed with or placed near each other." 



When we say three dice can be thrown in only two hundred and 

 sixteen ways, all we mean is that we cannot throw them in any other 

 way. We cannot throw three zeros, or three sevens, in any way, 

 with ordinary dice without changing the marks; but we cannot 

 attribute to the dice any latent capacity for being thrown in any 

 way, or any capacity to do anything whatever as dice, even after 

 we have been informed by Haeckel that " the real maker of the 

 organic world is, in all probability, a tetrahedron." ^ 



Except for a few odd thousands of quintillions of permutations 

 and combinations no others can be formed from twenty-six letters, 

 and if Galileo means any more than this by his remark that all 

 truth is contained in the compass of the alphabet; if his words are 

 more than figurative ; if he intends to assert that the potency of 

 literature is latent in the alphabet, independently of an author, — it 

 seems to me, with all respect for Galileo, that he is talking non- 

 sense; for while the production of a learned treatise by the fortui- 

 tous concourse of letters may not be impossible, all the books we 

 know of have come about in another way. 



Twenty-eight figures are required to express the number of dis- 

 tinct deals in whist. "If the whole population of the world, say 

 one thousand millions of persons, were to deal cards day and night 

 for a hundred million years," they might justify Sarah Battle's criti- 



1" Monism," pp. 27, 28. 



