82 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. 



fail to see any suspension of nature's physical chain of sequences. 

 Science, then, must relegate the fact, if a dead man is revived, 

 to what Bacon calls " instantiee monodicse, "or " heteroclit^," or 

 " irregulares ; " not that they obey no rule, belong to no species, 

 but, for the present, they stand alone. 



In fact, this perhaps will be one of the fruits of startling dis- 

 coveries in science, that our limited notions of the potentialities 

 of the world will be enlarged. Most grossly improbable as it 

 was, it was hardly received with suspicion by the majority, not 

 very long ago, that a human being could be thrown into a stupor 

 for a century and then revived. " There are more things in 

 heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy." 



As a test and illustration of these principles, I will take, be- 

 cause it happens to be found in a narrative, tolerably well known, 

 the assertion that three men were put into a fiery furnace, and 

 not burned. It is a severe test, because we cannot imagine any 

 antecedents, and that which is said to have been there, the intense 

 heat, seems to have had no consequent in the case of these three 

 men ; which, by itself, is inconceivable. 



But observe that the existence of another spiritual being in 

 sensible form is attested by the writer. Now, as one man works 

 a seeming miracle by substititutiog electric currents for waves of 

 sound, so it is certainly conceivable that another freely acting 

 agent should modify or turn back ethereal waves of heat in an 

 unknown manner, secure admission of air, etc., by media abso- 

 lutely unknown to us, but the order and chain of nature remaiaing 

 precisely what they are, and, so far as we know, always have 

 been. 



Much as the problem transcends our present knowledge, I do 

 not know what is unscientific in the hypothesis, or why, if duly 

 attested, the fact should not be referred to Bacon's " instantise 

 monodicse." 



Here I must conclude. I have endeavored to avoid theological 

 questions, and to confine myself to a philosophical and scientific 

 view. This, only, I would ask leave to add, with respect to the 

 presumed controversy between Christian faith and physical sci- 



