Mr. Galton assumes that "the efficacy of prayer is a perfectly appropriate and legitimate subject of scientific inquiry." It must be assumed to be subject to unvarying laws, and, like all physical problems, may be brought to the test of rigid mathematics. By the marshaling of very incomplete and partial statistics, drawn chiefly from Chalmers's "Biographical Dictionary," he endeavors to show that praying men, especially clergymen, are no healthier, recover from sickness no better, and do not live any longer than the men who do not pray. Insurance companies make no distinction between the prayerful and the prayerless; they regard them as equal risks. Furthermore, praying men do not make any better statesmen, any more successful men of business, or any better physicians and lawyers than prayerless men. On the contrary, "it is a common week-day opinion of the world that praying men are not practical." Finally, the children of praying parents are no better endowed intellectually, and do not turn out any better morally than the rest of mankind. His gentle impeachment is that they are somewhat below the common average. By this "scientific method," as he is pleased to call it, the writer flatters himself that he has routed the army of believers in the efficacy of prayer, and that the practice of prayer will soon become "obsolete;" "just as the Water of Jealousy and the Urim and Thummmin of the Mosaic law did in the times of the later Jewish kings." But Mr. Galton's fusillade did not produce the effect he expected. True, it made some noise, and for a brief season commanded attention; but it was soon discovered to be a mere discharge of rhetorical blank-cartridge which hit nothing. His parade of argument was found to be utterly inconsequential. The dullest mind could perceive that the attempt to solve moral problems by statistical averages was a practical folly, because it began by unceremoniously assuming the very point it ought to prove, namely, that _the determinations of will, whether Divine or human, are governed by necessary laws_ as surely as the revolution of planets and the vibration of molecules. It is precisely because personal acts are _not_ reducible to any fixed laws, or capable of representation by any numerical calculations, that statistical averages acquire any value as substitutes. "No one dreams of applying statistical averages to calculate the period of the earth's rotation, by showing that four and twenty hours is the exact medium of time, comparing one month's or one year's revolutions with another's. It is only where the individual movements are irregular that it is necessary to aim at a proximate regularity by calculating in masses."[430] The comparison of large averages may approach equality and furnish a basis of probability as to the future, but the contingency of each individual case remains still a contingency.