26 FROM NEBULA TO NEBULA 



veracious graver himself, the inscription read, simply, 

 "Bill Stumps, his mark". If Mr. Pickwick could come to 

 "life" again, I fancy that he would find himself very 

 much at home in the society of many modern astronomers. 

 A great orator has said that most men find it easy 

 enough to believe in miracles having occurred two thou- 

 sand or more years ago, or that they will again occur 

 two thousand years hence, but that it is next to impossible 

 to find anyone willing to credit their happening to-day. 

 Paraphrasing this epigram, I would say of Newtonians, 

 in general, that they show no compunction about postu- 

 lating mechanical miracles as freely taking place far up 

 in the firmament, or deep in past time, while they would 

 indignantly scout the possibility of such things occurring 

 right here and now. Thus, they nonchalantly predicate 

 the spontaneous rotation of the Laplacian nebula, though 

 they would summarily classify as incurably defective a 

 child of six who would expect as much of a mere squirrel- 

 wheel. 



UNUM versus OMNES 



On the theory of probabilities, the odds in every gen- 

 eration are a billion to one against the originator of an 

 idea being right and the world wrong. This formidable 

 preponderance of numbers against him has doubtless 

 awed many a timid, but correct, thinker into silence, and 

 cast many a stone in the path of human progress. Few of 

 us, I dare say, ever stop to reflect that every valuable 

 idea and item of information has incipiently been handi- 

 capped by identically these odds, and that all that man- 

 kind has garnered, or can ever acquire, in the way of use- 

 ful knowledge is merely the sum of these minority-of-one 

 discoveries that have won their way through gauntlets of 

 criticism to general acceptance. In every ship 's company, 

 at the close of every voyage, there is invariably one who 

 must be the first to sight port. Natural truth exists in- 

 dependently of both human wishes and opinions, and can- 

 not be settled one way or the other by a plebiscite, or even 

 by a council of the wisest of one 's own generation. It is re- 



