December 23, 1898.] 



SCIENCE. 



Except for a few odd thousands of quin- 

 tillions of permutations and combinations 

 no others can be formed from twenty-six 

 letters, and if Galileo means any more than 

 tMs by his remark that all truth is con- 

 tained in the compass of the alphabet ; if 

 his words are more than figurative ; if he 

 intends to assert ttat the potency of litera- 

 ture is latent in the alphabet, independently 

 of an author — it seems to me, with all re- 

 spect for Galileo, that he is talking nonsense; 

 for while the production of a learned treatise ' 

 by the fortuitous 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 ex- 

 press the number of distinct 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 mil- 

 lion years," they might justify Sarah Bat- 

 tle's criticism of the game, but they would 

 not in that time have exhausted one hund- 

 redth thousandth part of the possible deals. 



It is not clear to me that combinations 

 are latent in the things combined. In fact, 

 the bearing of these things on the matter 

 seems to be negative and passive, rather 

 than active or positive. 



It is not clear that, with all their latent 

 potency, a pack of cards would ever evolve 

 a single hand without a dealer ; but if a part 

 of the universe, so trivial and insignifi- 

 cant, presents opportunities so boundless, 

 the matter and motion of our universe may 

 present to a dealer opportunities for uni- 

 verses without end, no one like another, I 

 do not see how one can assert that anything 

 in the material universe is necessary or 

 predetermined, except so far as it is one 

 among an infinite number of possibilities. 



Huxley tells us that, " if the fundamen- 

 tal proposition of evolution, that the whole 

 world, living and not living, is the result of 

 the mutual interaction, according to definite 

 laws, of the forces possessed by the mole- 



cules of which the primitive nebulosity of 

 the universe was composed," be true, " it 

 is no less certain that the existing world 

 lay, potentially, in the cosmic vapor ; and 

 that a sufficient intelligence could, from a 

 knowledge of the properties of the mole- 

 cules of that vapor, have predicted, say, 

 the state of the fauna of Great Britain in 

 1868, with as much certainty as one can 

 say what will happen to the vapor of the 

 breath in a cold winter's day." 



The thoughtful reader will note that 

 Huxley's assertion that, if this proposition 

 be true, it is no less certain that the exist- 

 ing world lay, potentially, in the cosmic 

 vapor is no admission that the proposition 

 is true, or the deduction certain ; nor must 

 we forget that the most notable and valu- 

 able characteristic of Huxley's teachings is 

 the declaration, in all his works, of the 

 truth that the scientific basis of our confi- 

 dence in the order of nature is evidence. 



Again and again, in words which are un- 

 mistakable, he tells us that, while we may 

 have reasonable confidence what to expect 

 from the vapor of our breath in a cold win- 

 ter's day, we know nothing about it except 

 what has happened. The scientific value 

 of our confidence depends, he tells us, on 

 the extent of our experience of the behavior 

 of the vapor of our breath, and similar 

 bodies, on a cold day, or under similar 

 circumstances. As, in this case, our experi- 

 ence is pretty extensive, the deduction is 

 safe and reasonable ; but when a young man 

 who had passed his life in the tropics spent 

 the night on top of a high mountain with 

 my students he was so far from deducing 

 anything from the frosty morning air that 

 he was at first alarmed by the behavior of 

 the vapor of his breath. 



If Huxley is right ; if the logical basis for 

 confidence in nature is evidence, it seems 

 clear that no amount of knowledge can ever 

 give it any other basis ; for nothing seems 

 more obvious, or more strictly logical, than 



