action and conviction. The residuum with which we fret and worry
ourselves is a mere matter of detail, as the higgling and haggling of
the market, which is not over the bulk of the price, but over the
last halfpenny.

Shall we say, then, that a baby of a day old sucks (which involves
the whole principle of the pump, and hence a profound practical
knowledge of the laws of pneumatics and hydrostatics), digests,
oxygenises its blood (millions of years before Sir Humphry Davy
discovered oxygen), sees and hears--all most difficult and
complicated operations, involving a knowledge of the facts concerning
optics and acoustics, compared with which the discoveries of Newton
sink into utter insignificance? Shall we say that a baby can do all
these things at once, doing them so well and so regularly, without
being even able to direct its attention to them, and without mistake,
and at the same time not know how to do them, and never have done
them before?

Such an assertion would be a contradiction to the whole experience of
mankind. Surely the onus probandi must rest with him who makes it.

A man may make a lucky hit now and again by what is called a fluke,
but even this must be only a little in advance of his other
performances of the same kind. He may multiply seven by eight by a
fluke after a little study of the multiplication table, but he will
not be able to extract the cube root of 4913 by a fluke, without long
training in arithmetic, any more than an agricultural labourer would
be able to operate successfully for cataract. If, then, a grown man
cannot perform so simple an operation as that we will say, for
cataract, unless he have been long trained in other similar