"If there be any way of enumerating the possibilities of Nature so as to make them equally probable, it is clearly one which should make one arrangement or combination of the elements of Nature as probable as another.... It would be to assume that Nature is a pure chaos, or chance combination of independent elements, in which reasoning from one fact to another would be impossible; and since, as we shall hereafter see, there is no judgment of pure observation without reasoning, it would be to suppose all human cognition illusory and no real knowledge possible. It would be to suppose that if we have found the order of Nature more or less regular in the past, this has been by a pure run of luck which we may expect is now at an end. Now, it may be we have no scintilla of proof to the contrary, but reason is unnecessary in reference to that belief which is of all the most settled, which nobody doubts or can doubt, and which he who should deny would stultify himself in so doing. "The relative probability of this or that arrangement of Nature is something which we should have a right to talk about if universes were as plenty as blackberries, if we could put a quantity of them in a bag, shake them well up, draw out a sample, and examine them to see what proportion of them had one arrangement and what proportion another. But, even in that case, a higher universe would contain us, in regard to whose arrangements the conception of probability could have no applicability." I rest the case here in the hope that the statement of both sides of the problem will contribute to elucidate truth. EDITOR. FIVE SOULS WITH BUT A SINGLE THOUGHT. THE PSYCHOLOGICAL LIFE OF THE STAR-FISH. The investigation of the psychical faculties of animals is comparable to a journey into fairy-land. We do not know, and according to Du Bois-Reymond, we shall never know, how our own mental activity has originated, yet in spite of this we deliberately form theories and opinions concerning the psychical powers and faculties of other beings that in point of nervous organisation are perhaps altogether different from us! The ancients wisely limited themselves to expressing the intelligence of animals in the form of instructive fables, and in the famous park of Versailles the charming idea was actually carried out of representing the fables of Æsop in a so-called labyrinth, every turn of the intricate lanes of which led to a different group of animals whose speech was symbolised by streams of water spouting from their mouths, and the purport of their imagined utterances was to be read in golden letters upon marble tablets placed at the side. How often have I wandered over the scene of those long since ruined mazes and have thought of the deep meaning that frequently lies in childish pastime of this kind.