Evolution and creation / by Sir Oliver Lodge.

  • Oliver Lodge
Date:
1930
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Evolution and creation / by Sir Oliver Lodge. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    56/172 page 52
    exceptions have been discovered, they may perhaps be of the kind which prove the rule. I do not know whether it is clear why exceptions prove the rule; but they often do. If for instance it was stated that no life had been lost in an earthquake, and then someone found that say a goat had been killed by it : that exception would make the previous statement still more forcible and striking. Or if a newspaper should state that no rain had fallen, say in London, for a given month; and then a meteorological expert with an apparatus for minutely measuring rain were to object that he had counted three drops to the square yard one morning; he would not be held to have upset the statement, but for all practical purposes to have confirmed it. Very often the reason for the exception becomes quite plain after investigation, and is seen not to be really an exception at all; and then our knowledge of nature is made fuller and more precise by taking it into account. Thus a child or a savage, accustomed to the idea that everything falls, might be surprised to see a balloon
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