96 TRANSACTIONS OF THE 



pected than the contrary, and whether admiratidh be really the 

 proper attitude to maintain towards it. 



3. It had been remarked by Brinkley " that if the velocity of 

 light had been much less than it is astronomy would have been all 

 but an impossible science." If it had been greater than it is, 

 however, astronomical observation would have been in the same 

 degree facilitated ; and there was the same antecedent probability 

 that it would be greater as less. 



4. As a final case under this head was noted the circumstance 

 that if the manufacture of alcohol had been so simple a process 

 that the lowest races could have at all times obtained an unlimited 

 amount of it, this would probably have effectually prevented the 

 social development of the race, if it did not entirely extinguish it. 

 It is a fortunate coincidence, therefore, that its production is only 

 possible by races that have advanced far enough intellectually to be 

 capable of foreseeing to some extent its evil effects and of exercising 

 a certain control over their appetite for it. 



Passing to the third group, or those instances in which the 

 advantage is more apparent than real, only a single . case was 

 adduced as a type of the class. 



This was the fact, so strenuously insisted upon by certain physi- 

 cists, and notably Count Rumford, as a wise provision of nature in 

 the interest of man, that water attains its greatest-density at about 

 39^° Fahrenheit, instead of at the actual freezing point. This 

 view was based upon the supposition that if it were otherwise all 

 bodies of water, even the ocean, would be frozen solid as often as 

 the temperature fell to 32 . The fallacy of this reasoning has long 

 been exposed, and it has been shown : first, that this property does 

 not apply to the salt water of the ocean, which is about in the state 

 from which the worst results of the theory would occur ; second, 

 that these results do not occur there, and would not in any liquid, 

 but rather the opposite ones, viz., that bodies of water would never 

 freeze over in temperate climates at all, since the superincumbent 



