Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/427

Rh with honest dice. Any man in his senses might have known beforehand that the dice were cogged, and the fellows who found this out only after their money was gone were laughed at heartily. But the point of the story is this: If two dice fall on the same side four times in succession, you, not being lazzaroni, hold it to be impossible that the thing should happen by accident. You conclude, with undoubting certitude, that a hidden cause, designed to produce this effect, has been incorporated in the dice, in the shape of a little lead. But, when you see all around you this universe, with its innumerable suns, planets, and moons, which, poised in vacancy, have for thousands of years been rhythmically traveling in their courses, without ever a collision; when you see on this globe dry land, sea and atmosphere, sunshine and rain, so distributed that myriads of plants and of terrestrial, aquatic, and aerial animals swarm in joyous life; when, for all these creatures, you see the alternation of day and night, of winter and summer, beneficently answering, in all respects, to the requirements of activity and rest, cessation and growth; when, in your own body, you see each particle of its ineffably complicated structure performing exactly the functions which the good of the whole organism demands, while in turn it can itself subsist only in the whole; when, in your own members, your eye, your ear, you see the profoundest science of the mechanician or the optician so far transcended that our friend D'Alembert and the great Euler yonder in St. Petersburg, e tutti quanti, appear as fools; when you see this machine—alongside of which your Le Roy's finest watch is, as it were, some coarse piece of mill-gearing, your Vaucanson's most ingenious automaton a wretched toy—perfecting itself by practice, making its own repairs; when you see it even reproduce its own kind, and male and female most charmingly, mother and child most beautifully adapted to each other; when, in the Jardin du Roi, under a thousand animal forms, from the elephant to the shrew-mouse, M. de Buffon shows you as many types of your own organization, each one adapted in its own way for the enjoyment of life and the pursuit of its prey, for defense against its foes for propagation of its kind, and for care of its young; when you see the bees solving their cell-problem as correctly as the most learned of mathematicians, the spiders bracing their polygons of silken threads, the mole excavating its galleries, the beaver constructing its dams; when, further, in all these instances you see the agreeable combined with the useful, and magnificence, ornament, and grace everywhere lavishly displayed—Flora's children clothed with beauty, the gaudy butterfly flitting about among them, the peacock spreading his tail feathers; finally, when Mr. Needham shows you, under his microscope, how each drop of vinegar or of paste is alive with creatures as numerous as the worlds you have been able to descry through M. de Cassini's telescope—you confidently say that all this is chance. And yet the spectacle presented to us by nature is the same as though some one were every instant, with an infinite number of dice, to make exactly the