Abstract: To my daughter GiovannaHow was it that man was ever led to entertain that true theory?You cannot say that it happened by chance, because the possible theories, if not strictly innumerable, at any rate exceed a trillion -or the third power of a million; and therefore the chances are too overwhelmingly against the single true theory in the twenty or thirty thousand years during which man has been a thinking animal, ever having come into any man's head.Besides, you cannot seriously think that every little chicken, that is hatched, has to rummage through all possible theories until it lights upon the good idea of picking up something and eating it.On the contrary, you think the chicken has an innate idea of doing this; that is to say, that it can think of this, but has no faculty of thinking anything else.The chicken you say pecks by instinct.But if you are going to think every poor chicken endowed with an innate tendency toward a positive truth, why should you think that to man alone this gift is denied?