It is difficult to render such an argument precise without rendering it simply ridiculous. Strictly understood it can surely bear only one of two interpretations. On the one hand we may be personifying Chance: regarding it as an agent which must be reckoned with as being quite capable of having produced man, or at any rate having arranged the proportion of the sexes. And then the decision must be drawn, as between this agent and the Creator, which of the two produced the existent arrangement. If so, and Chance be defined as any agent which produces a chance or random arrangement, I am afraid there can be little doubt that it was this agent that was at work in the case in question. The arrangement of male and female births presents, so far as we can see, one of the most perfect examples of chance: there is ultimate uniformity emerging out of individual irregularity: all the 'runs' or successions of each alternative are duly represented: the fact of, say, five sons having been already born in a family does not seem to have any certain effect in diminishing the likelihood of the next being a son, and so on. Such a nearly perfect instance of 'independent events' is comparatively very rare in physical phenomena. It is all that we can claim from a chance arrangement.[9] The only other interpretation I can see is to suggest that there was but one agent who might, like any one of us, have either tossed up or designed, and we have to ascertain which course he probably adopted in the case in question. Here too, if we are to judge of his mode of action by the tests we should apply to any work of our own, it would certainly look very much as if he had adopted some scheme of tossing. 21. The simple fact is that any rational attempt to decide between chance and design as agencies must be confined to the case of finite intelligences. One of the important determining elements here, as we have seen, is the state of knowledge of the agent, and the conventional estimate entertained about this or that particular arrangement; and these can be appreciated only when we are dealing with beings like ourselves.