It is interesting to note that, though written only a few decades ago, the final assertion that chance is totally excluded from the universe would today be challenged by many scientists of the highest standing as being too broad a generalization.

For, startling though it may appear, recent scientific discoveries and experiments tend to show that the chain of

cause and effect is not invariable; that things sometimes happen and sometimes don't, in such eccentric fashion that their occurrence or non-occurrence is apparently a matter of mere chance or luck!

This startlingly novel viewpoint was recently championed at a scientific gathering by a scientist of unimpeachable standing. Speaking before a meeting of the American Chemical Society at Chicago, Dr. D. W. Swann of the Bartol Research Foundation asked his professional brethren to accept the element of pure chance or luck as the final explanation of certain material phenomena.

"Science heretofore," he declared, "has always felt that everything that happened could be traced to some cause,

which in turn always had a definite effect. But we now know that the results of many purely physical phenomena, such as the transmission of heat, depend upon what science inadequately calls the 'laws of probability,' which is just another name for chance or luck. "It has long been known that some of the molecules of the air are electrically charged. Yet when we come right down to actual figuring, only one in one hundred million is so charged. There is no apparent reason why one of these air molecules, rather than any other, should have this electrical charge-which makes possible lightning, rain, thunder, and other happenings of the air. Science has been able to account for this in no other way than by explaining the phenomena in terms of luck, which has now become a new type of scientific thought."