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.

Yet one more illustration for the last. Few things in nature appear more
unlikely to the illiterate, than that a living toad should be found
prisoned in a blo