leon being Antichrist, the Beast, the eighth Head, etc.;
and the present dispensation is to close soon after 1864.

In order rightly to judge Craig, who added speculations on the variations
of pleasure and pain treated as functions of time, it is necessary to
remember that in Newton's day the idea of force, as a quantity to be
measured, and as following a law of variation, was very new: so likewise
was that of probability, or belief, as an object of measurement.[269] The
success of the _Principia_ of Newton put it into many heads to speculate
about applying notions of quantity to other things not then brought under
measurement. Craig imitated Newton's title, and evidently thought he was
making a step in advance: but it is not every one who can plough with
Samson's heifer.

It is likely enough that Craig took a hint, directly or indirectly, from
Mohammedan writers, who make a reply to the argument that the Koran has not
the evidence derived {131} from miracles. They say that, as evidence of
Christian miracles is daily becoming weaker, a time must at last arrive
when it will fail of affording assurance that they were miracles at all:
whence would arise the necessity of another prophet and other miracles.
Lee,[270] the Cambridge Orientalist, from whom the above words are taken,
almost certainly never heard of Craig or his theory.

THE ARISTOCRAT AS A SCIENTIST.

Copernicans of all sorts convicted ... to which is added a Treatise of
the Magnet. By the Hon. Edw. Howard, of Berks. London, 1705, 8vo.

Not all the blood of all the Howards will gain respect for a writer who
maintains that eclipses admit no possible explanation under the Copernican
hypothesis, and who asks how a man can "go 200 yards to any place if the
moving superficies of the earth does carry it from him?" Horace Walpole, at
the beginning of his _Royal and Noble Authors_, has mottoed his book with
the Cardinal's address to Ariosto, "Dove diavolo, Messer Ludovico, avete
pigliato tante coglionerie?"[271] Walter Scott says you could hardly pick
out, on any principle of selection--except badness itself, he means of
course--the same number of plebeian authors whose works are so bad. But his
implied satire on aristocratic writing forgets two points. First, during a
large period of our history, when persons of rank condescended to write,
they veiled themselves under "a person of honor," "a person of quality,"
and the like, when not wholly undescribed.