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tory were at length to be revealed, and to cast their reflective light on the darker pages of sacred and profane history .... The incident in the labors of Dr. Young seems so surprising that it might be deemed providential, if not miraculous.' The same will scarcely be thought of such events (and their name is legion) as De Morgan has recorded; since it requires a considerable stretch of imagination to conceive that either the discovery of the name of a certain editor, or the removal of De Morgan's difficulties respecting the siege of Boston, was a nodus worthy of miraculous interposition.
For absolute triviality, however, combined with sin-
gularity of coincidence, a circumstance which occurred to me several years ago appears unsurpassable. I was raising a tumbler in such a way that at the moment it was a few inches above my mouth; but whether to examine its substance against the light, or for what particular purpose, has escaped my recollection. Be that as it may, the tumbler slipped from my fingers and fell so that the edge struck against one of my lower teeth. The fall was just enough to have broken the tumbler (at least, against a sharp object like a tooth), and I expected to have my mouth unpleasantly filled with glass fragments and perhaps seriously cut. However, though there was a sharp blow, the glass remained unbroken. On examining it, I found that
large drop of wax had fallen on the edge at the very spot where it had struck my tooth, an indentation being left by the tooth. Doubtless the softening of the shock by the interposition of the wax had just saved the glass from fracture. In any case, however, the surprising nature of the coincidence is not affected. On considering the matter it will be seen how enormous were the antecedent odds against the observed event. It is not an usual thing for a tumbler to slip in such a
· way: it has not at any other time happened to me, and probably not a single reader of these lines can recall such an occurrence either in his own experience or that of others. Then it very seldom happens, I suppose, that a drop of wax falls on the edge of a tumbler and there remains unnoticed. That two events so unusual should be coincident, and that the
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