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[ti:A Chance in a Million]
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[00:01.47]Lesson 36
[00:03.92]A chance in a million
[00:12.45]What was the chance in a million?
[00:17.40]We are less credulous than we used to be.
[00:20.85]In the nineteenth century, a novelist would bring his story to a conclusion
[00:25.63]by presenting his readers with a series of coincidences --
[00:29.88]most of them wildly improbable.
[00:33.46]Readers happily accepted the fact
[00:35.87]that an obscure maidservant was really the hero's mother.
[00:40.05]A long-lost brother, who was presumed dead, was really alive all the time
[00:45.21]and wickedly plotting to bring about the hero's downfall. And so on.
[00:50.28]Modern readers would find such naive solutions totally unacceptable.
[00:55.60]Yet, in real life, circumstances do sometimes conspire to bring about coincidences
[01:02.43]which anyone but a nineteenth century novelist would find incredible.
[01:07.68]When I was a boy, my grandfather told me how a German taxi driver, Franz Bussman,
[01:14.19]found a brother who was thought to have been killed twenty years before.
[01:19.18]While on a walking tour with his wife, he stopped to talk to a workman.
[01:24.32]After they had gone on,
[01:25.97]Mrs. Bussman commented on the workman's close resemblance to her husband