a long while they have been subjected to air-currents constantly changing, they have been caught in very small whirlwinds, so that their final distribution has no longer any relation to their initial distribution. Suddenly the temperature falls, vapor condenses, and each of these ions becomes the center of a drop of rain. To know what will be the distribution of these drops and how many will fall on each paving-stone, it would not be sufficient to know the initial situation of the ions, it would be necessary to compute the effect of a thousand little capricious air-currents.
And again it is the same if we put grains of powder in suspension in water. The vase is ploughed by currents whose law we know not, we only know it is very complicated. At the end of a certain time the grains will be distributed at random, that is to say uniformly, in the vase; and this is due precisely to the complexity of these currents. If they obeyed some simple law, if for example the vase revolved and the currents circulated around the axis of the vase, describing circles, it would no longer be the same, since each grain would retain its initial altitude and its initial distance from the axis.
We should reach the same result in considering the mixing of two liquids or of two fine-grained powders. And to take a grosser example, this is also what happens when we shuffle playing-cards. At each stroke the cards undergo a permutation (analogous to that studied in the theory of substitutions). What will happen? The probability of a particular permutation (for example, that bringing to the nth place the card occupying the ϕ(n)th place before the permutation) depends upon the player's habits. But if this player shuffles the cards long enough, there will be a great number of successive permutations, and the resulting final order will no longer be governed by aught but chance; I mean to say that all possible orders will be equally probable. It is to the great number of successive permutations, that is to say to the complexity of the phenomenon, that this result is due.