

SCIENTIFIC SIDE-LIGHTS 



Caves 

 Chance 



Davy, in his " Account of Ceylon," gives an 

 interesting observation of his own on a 

 young crocodile, which he cut out of the 

 egg, and which, as soon as it escaped, started 

 off in a direct line for a neighboring stream. 

 Dr. Davy placed his stick before it to try to 

 make the little animal deviate from its 

 course; but it stoutly resisted the opposi- 

 tion, and raised itself into a posture of of- 

 fense, just as an older animal would have 

 done. Humboldt made exactly the same ob- 

 servation with regard to young turtles, and 

 he remarks that, as the young normally quit 

 the egg at night, they cannot see the water 

 which they seek, and must therefore be 

 guided to it by discerning the direction in 

 which the air is most humid. He adds that 

 experiments were made which consisted in 

 putting the newly hatched animals into 

 bags, carrying them to some distance from 

 the shore, and liberating them with their 

 tails turned towards the water. It was in- 

 variably found that the young animals im- 

 mediately faced round and took without 

 hesitation the shortest way to the water. 

 ROMANES Animal Intelligence, ch. 8, p. 257. 

 (A., 1899.) 



450. CERTAINTY, SCIENTIFIC, THE 

 GROUND OF A Stable Consensus of Belief. 

 It would thus appear that philosophy tends, 

 after all, to unsettle what appear to be 

 permanent convictions of the common mind 

 and the presuppositions of science much less 

 than is sometimes imagined. Our intuitions 

 of external realities, our indestructible be- 

 lief in the uniformity of Nature, in the 

 nexus of cause and effect, and so on, are, by 

 the admission of all philosophers, at least 

 partially and relatively true ; that is to say, 

 true in relation to certain features of our 

 common experience. At the worst, they can 

 only be called illusory as slightly misrepre- 

 senting the exact results of this experience. 

 And even so, the misrepresentation must, by 

 the very nature of the case, be practically 

 insignificant. And so in full view of the 

 subtleties of philosophic speculation, the 

 man of science may still feel justified in re- 

 garding his standard of truth, a stable con- 

 sensus of belief, as above suspicion. SULLY 

 Illusions, ch. 12, p. 361. (A., 1897.) 



451. CHALK CLIFFS OF ENGLAND 

 WERE ONCE PART OF THE OCEAN FLOOR 



However, the important points for us are, 

 that the living Globigerince [see MICRO-OR- 

 GANISMS] are exclusively marine animals, 

 the skeletons of which abound at the bottom 

 of deep seas; and that there is not a 

 shadow of reason for believing that the 

 habits of the Globigerince of the chalk dif- 

 fered from those of the existing species. 

 But if this be true, there is no escaping the 

 conclusion that the chalk itself is the dried 

 mud of an ancient deep sea. HUXLEY Lay 

 Sermons, ch. 9, p. 186. (G. P. P., 1899.) 



452. CHANCE, A WORLD OF Cause 

 and Effect Abolished Reason Impossible. 



There used to be a children's book which 

 bore the fascinating title of " The Chance 

 World." It described a world in which 

 everything happened by chance. The sun 

 might rise or it might not; or it might ap- 

 pear at any hour, or the moon might come 

 up instead. When children were born they 

 might have one head or a dozen heads, and 

 those heads might not be on their shoulders 

 there might be no shoulders but ar- 

 ranged about the limbs. If one jumped up 

 in the air it was impossible to predict 

 whether he would ever come down again. 

 That he came down yesterday was no guar- 

 antee that he would do it next time. For 

 every day antecedent and consequent varied, 

 and gravitation and everything else changed 

 from hour to hour. To-day a child's body 

 might be so light that it was impossible for 

 it to descend from its chair to the floor ; but 

 to-morrow, in attempting the experiment 

 again, the impetus might drive it through a 

 three-story house and dash it to pieces some- 

 where near the center of the earth. In this 

 chance world cause and effect were abol- 

 ished. Law was annihilated. And the re- 

 sult to the inhabitants of such a world could 

 only be that reason would be impossible. It 

 would be a lunatic world with a population 

 of lunatics. DKUMMOND Natural Law in 

 the Spiritual World, p. 33. (H. Al.) 



453. CHANCE DOES NOT GIVE CO- 

 HERENCE AND CONSISTENCY Earth's 

 Progress Marked by Consistent Purpose. 

 The tree is known by its fruits, and the 

 fruits of chance are incoherence, incom- 

 pleteness, unsteadiness, the stammering ut- 

 terance of blind, unreasoning force. A co- 

 herence that binds all the geological ages in 

 one chain, a stability of purpose that com- 

 pletes in the beings born to-day an intention 

 expressed in the first creatures that swam 

 in the Silurian ocean or crept upon its 

 shores, a stedfastness of thought, practi- 

 cally recognized by man, if not acknowl- 

 edged by him, whenever he traces the intelli- 

 gent connection between the facts of Nature 

 and combines them into what he is pleased 

 to call his system of geology, or zoology, or 

 botany these things are not the fruits of 

 chance or of an unreasoning force, but the 

 legitimate results of intellectual power. 

 AGASSIZ Geological Sketches, ser. i, ch. 1, p. 

 21. (H. M. & Co., 1896.) 



454. CHANCE FINALLY RULED OUT 

 OF NATURE No "Fortuitous Concourse of 

 Atoms" Law Rules the Universe. The 

 element of chance, which some atheists for- 

 merly admitted into their scheme of things, 

 is expelled. Nobody would now waste his 

 time in theorizing about a fortuitous con- 

 course of atoms. We have so far spelled out 

 the history of creation as to see that all has 

 been done in strict accordance with law. 

 The method has been the method of evolu- 

 tion, and the more we study it the more do 

 we discern in it intelligible coherence. One 



