William Stanley Jevons Quote

Nature is to us like an infinite ballot-box, the contents of which are being continually drawn, ball after ball, and exhibited to us. Science is but the careful observation of the succession in which balls of various character present themselves; we register the combinations, notice those which seem to be excluded from occurrence, and from the proportional frequency of those which usually appear we infer the probable character of future drawings.

p. 169 - The Principles of Science: A Treatise on Logic and Scientific Method (1874) Vol. 1