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The improbability of the fact never fails to raise mirth in the audience; and one may venture to answer for a British House of Commons, if we may guess from its conduct hitherto, that it will scarce be either so tame or so weak as our author supposes." The Edinburgh Review, April, 1844 This book has more than one title to our serious attention.
Said the plain man, weakly: "I just had to start for somewhere, so I started for Timbuctoo." Said the traveller: "Well, I'm of a forgiving disposition. Shake hands." The two individuals in the foregoing parable were worrying each other with fundamental questions. And what makes the parable unrealistic is the improbability of real individuals ever doing any such thing.
There is no improbability even of the Malays of southeastern Asia extending step by step to the Polynesian Islands, and among them and beyond them, till the shores of a new world finally received the impress of their footsteps and of their ethnic characteristics.
But these pleasing traits are not sufficient to atone for the improbability of the incidents, relieved neither by the brilliant fancy of the East, nor the lofty deeds of the romances of chivalry: and the reader, wearied by the repetition of similar scenes and characters, thinly disguised by change of name and place, finds little reason to regret that "the children of the marriage of Theagenes and Chariclea," as these romances are termed by a writer quoted by d'Israeli in the "Curiosities of Literature" have not continued to increase and multiply up to our own times.
And yet this very situation offered her that gleam of hope which had thrilled her; a hope so wild in its improbability, so degrading in its possibility, that at first she knew not whether despair was not preferable to its shame. And yet was it unreasonable? She was no longer passionate; she would be calm and think it out fairly. She would go to Low at once.
A greater fault, perhaps, is his passion for anecdote; he cannot forbear from repeating stories the improbability of which he is the first to recognize, which, nevertheless, by mere repetition, leave unjust impressions. He is unfair in this way to Demosthenes and Pericles, against the latter of whom, however, he doubtless inherited the prejudices which Plato handed down to the philosophers.
My senses assured me of the truth of them, and yet their abruptness and improbability made me, in my turn, somewhat incredulous. The adventure had made a deep impression on my fancy, and it was not till after a week's abode at my brother's, that I resolved to resume the possession of my own dwelling. There was another circumstance that enhanced the mysteriousness of this event.
Granting the cultivated state of the palms as the only really important one, and considering the impossibility or at least great improbability of its dissemination by natural means, the distribution by man himself, according to his wants, assumes the rank of an hypothesis fully adequate to the explanation of all the facts concerning the life-history of the tree.
The first point which he desired to emphasise was that human intelligence should hesitate before no improbability, however improbable, provided that some explanation was humanly conceivable, and no definite material object rendered the improbability an impossibility.
After visiting the spot in 1846, I described the geological position of the bones, and discussed their probable age, with a stronger bias, I must confess, as to the antecedent improbability of the contemporaneous entombment of Man and the mastodon than any geologist would now be justified in entertaining. Modern alluvium of the Mississippi. 2. Loam or loess. 3, f. Eocene. 4.
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