Illustrations, if apt, are so well adapted to persuade towards a particular line of argument, that, at the risk of diffuseness, and because minds being various are variously touched, one by one thought and one by another, I think fit to add yet more of a similar tendency:  in the hope that, by a natural induction, such instances may smoothe our way.

When an eminent living geologist was prosecuting his researches at Kirkdale cave, Yorkshire, he had calculated so nicely on the antecedent probabilities, that his commands to the labourers were substantially these:  “Take your mattocks, and pick up that stone flooring; then take your basket, and fill it—­with the bones of hyaenas and other creatures which you will find there.”  We may fancy the ridicule wherewith ignorance might have greeted science:  but lo, the triumph of philosophy, when its mandate soon assumed a bodily shape in—­bushels of bones gnawed as by wild beasts, and here and there a grinning skull that looked like a hyaena’s!  Do we not see how this bears on our coming argument?  Such a deposit was very unlikely to be found there in the eyes of the unenlightened:  but very likely to the wise man’s ken.  The real probabilities were in favour of a strange fact, though the seeming probabilities were against it.

Take another.  We are all now convinced of the existence of America; and so, some three or four hundred years back, was Christopher Columbus—­but nobody else.  Alone, he proved that mighty continent so probable, from geometrical measurements, and the balance of the world, and tides, and trade-winds, and casual floatsams driven from some land beneath the setting sun, that he was antecedently convinced of the fact:  and it would have been a shock to his reason, as well as to his faith, had he found himself able to sail due west from Lisbon to China, without having struck against his huge probability.  I purposely abstain from applying every illustration, or showing its specific difference regarding our theme.  It is better to lead a mind to think for itself than to endeavour to forestall every notion.

Another.  A Kissoor merchant in Timbuctoo is told of the existence of water hard and cold as marble.  All the experience of his nation is against it.  He disbelieves.  However, after no long time, the testimony of two native princes who have been feted in England, and have seen ice, shakes his once not unreasonable incredulity:  and the additional idea brought soon to his remembrance, that, as lead cools down from hot fluidity to a solid lump, so, in the absence of solar heat, in all probability would water—­corroborates and makes acceptable by analogous likelihood the doctrine simultaneously evidenced by credible witnesses.