COINCIDENCES, LUCK, CHANCE 

 matters of mixed skill and chance, and ultimately the 

 student sees it traceable in pure skill and throughout all 

 nature, so that by this avenue, through such a brain open- 

 ing, enters the idea (and ultimately the belief), that it 

 pervades all the phenomena of life, mental and physical. 



This, I take it, is how the reasoning is done ; but in 

 practice the entry of the thought seems to have been made 

 as often through the avenue of Betting, thence up to 

 Insurance, which two opposite things seem as yet hope- 

 lessly mixed together in the minds of the masses. How- 

 ever, in the eyes of a "real sport," all Insurances that 

 actually insure are dishonorable betting, because Insurance 

 is done on a known certainty — an average or long-run 

 certainty, a quality of certainty practically unknown when 

 many of us went to school. There some of us learned how to 

 work out permutations, but the ordinary idea we then got 

 was that some such results were possible ; not that they 

 were probable, much less was the idea brought home to us 

 that the}^ were actually and operatively certain in daily life. 



May I emphasize this recent view of long-run certainty 

 by briefly listing some modern Insurances, viz : Against 

 life, as twins and triplets, as well as against death, 

 accident, injury to person, and single blessedness. Against 

 plate glass fracture, burglary, fire, lightniug, hail, wind, 

 flood, in fact against all forms of storm and wreck, includ- 

 ing explosions ; against property title transfer and other 

 legal errors, and many kinds of fraud and trust betrayal. 

 These things are now seen to keep proportion and bounds, 

 so that the losses they entail, being widely distributed, are 

 lightly borne ; and the possibilities of the future look less 

 malignant to us, as we recognize life to be the theatre of 

 causes and laws — a close spun web of interlacing effects, a 

 field of persistent regularity in births and deaths, sexes, 

 size of stature, number of men of genius (as Galton shows), 

 climate, temperature, electrical tension and discharge, 

 vegetable and animal growth. Such thoughts bring up 

 recollections of T. Buckle, whose " History of Civilization 



