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Title: On the Method of Zadig
       Essay #1 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition"

Author: Thomas Henry Huxley

Release Date: December 3, 2008 [EBook #2627]
Last Updated: January 20, 2013

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ON THE METHOD OF ZADIG ***




Produced by D. R. Thompson, and David Widger





 




ON THE METHOD OF ZADIG  

ESSAY #1 FROM "SCIENCE AND HEBREW TRADITION"  




By Thomas Henry Huxley  










Contents  

RETROSPECTIVE PROPHECY AS A FUNCTION OF SCIENCE

FOOTNOTES









RETROSPECTIVE PROPHECY AS A FUNCTION OF SCIENCE  

"Une marque plus sure que toutes celles de Zadig." 1Cuvier.  


It is an usual and a commendable practice to preface the discussion of the  views of a philosophic thinker by some account of the man and of the  circumstances which shaped his life and coloured his way of looking at  things; but, though Zadig is cited in one of the most important chapters  of Cuvier's greatest work, little is known about him, and that little  might perhaps be better authenticated than it is.  

It is said that he lived at Babylon in the time of King Moabdar; but the  name of Moabdar does not appear in the list of Babylonian sovereigns  brought to light by the patience and the industry of the decipherers of  cuneiform inscriptions in these later years; nor indeed am I aware that  there is any other authority for his existence than that of the biographer  of Zadig, one Arouet de Voltaire, among whose more conspicuous merits  strict historical accuracy is perhaps hardly to be reckoned.  

Happily Zadig is in the position of a great many other philosophers. What  he was like when he was in the flesh, indeed whether he existed at all,  are matters of no great consequence. What we care about in a light is that  it shows the way, not whether it is lamp or candle, tallow or wax. Our  only real interest in Zadig lies in the conceptions of which he is the  putative father; and his biographer has stated these with so much  clearness and vivacious illustration, that we need hardly feel a pang,  even if critical research should prove King Moabdar and all the rest of  the story to be unhistorical, and reduce Zadig himself to the shadowy  condition of a solar myth.  

Voltaire tells us that, disenchanted with life by sundry domestic  misadventures, Zadig withdrew from the turmoil of Babylon to a secluded  retreat on the banks of the Euphrates, where he beguiled his solitude by  the study of nature. The manifold wonders of the world of life had a  particular attraction for the lonely student; incessant and patient  observation of the plants and animals about him sharpened his naturally  good powers of observation and of reasoning; until, at length, he acquired  a sagacity which enabled him to perceive endless minute differences among  objects which, to the untutored eye, appeared absolutely alike.  

It might have been expected that this enlargement of the powers of the  mind and of its store of natural knowledge could tend to nothing but the  increase of a man's own welfare and the good of his fellow-men. But Zadig  was fated to experience the vanity of such expectations.  
  "One day, walking near a little wood, he saw, hastening that
  way, one of the Queen's chief eunuchs, followed by a troop of
  officials, who appeared to be in the greatest anxiety, running
  hither and thither like men distraught, in search of some
  lost treasure.

  "'Young man,' cried the eunuch, 'have you seen the Queen's dog?'
  Zadig answered modestly, 'A bitch, I think, not a dog.'
  'Quite right,' replied the eunuch; and Zadig continued, 'A very
  small spaniel who has lately had puppies; she limps with the
  left foreleg, and has very long ears.' 'Ah! you have seen her
  then,' said the breathless eunuch. 'No,' answered Zadig, 'I have
  not seen her; and I really was not aware that the Queen
  possessed a spaniel.'

  "By an odd coincidence, at the very same time, the handsomest
  horse in the King's stables broke away from his groom in the
  Babylonian plain. The grand huntsman and all his staff were
  seeking the horse with as much anxiety as the eunuch and his
  people the spaniel; and the grand huntsman asked Zadig if he had
  not seen the King's horse go that way.

  "'A first-rate galloper, small-hoofed, five feet high;
  tail three feet and a half long; cheek pieces of the bit of
  twenty-three carat gold; shoes silver?' said Zadig.

  "'Which way did he go? Where is he?' cried the grand huntsman.

  "'I have not seen anything of the horse, and I never heard of
  him before,' replied Zadig.

  "The grand huntsman and the chief eunuch made sure that Zadig
  had stolen both the King's horse and the Queen's spaniel, so
  they haled him before the High Court of Desterham, which at once
  condemned him to the knout, and transportation for life to
  Siberia. But the sentence was hardly pronounced when the lost
  horse and spaniel were found. So the judges were under the
  painful necessity of reconsidering their decision: but they
  fined Zadig four hundred ounces of gold for saying he had seen
  that which he had not seen.

  "The first thing was to pay the fine; afterwards Zadig was
  permitted to open his defence to the court, which he did in the
  following terms:

  "'Stars of justice, abysses of knowledge, mirrors of truth,
  whose gravity is as that of lead, whose inflexibility is as that
  of iron, who rival the diamond in clearness, and possess no
  little affinity with gold; since I am permitted to address your
  august assembly, I swear by Ormuzd that I have never seen the
  respectable lady dog of the Queen, nor beheld the sacrosanct
  horse of the King of Kings.

  "'This is what happened. I was taking a walk towards the little
  wood near which I subsequently had the honour to meet the
  venerable chief eunuch and the most illustrious grand huntsman.
  I noticed the track of an animal in the sand, and it was easy to
  see that it was that of a small dog. Long faint streaks upon the
  little elevations of sand between the footmarks convinced me
  that it was a she dog with pendent dugs, showing that she must
  have had puppies not many days since. Other scrapings of the
  sand, which always lay close to the marks of the forepaws,
  indicated that she had very long ears; and, as the imprint of
  one foot was always fainter than those of the other three, I
  judged that the lady dog of our august Queen was, if I may
  venture to say so, a little lame.

  "'With respect to the horse of the King of Kings, permit me to
  observe that, wandering through the paths which traverse the
  wood, I noticed the marks of horse-shoes. They were all
  equidistant. "Ah!" said I, "this is a famous galloper." In a
  narrow alley, only seven feet wide, the dust upon the trunks of
  the trees was a little disturbed at three feet and a half from
  the middle of the path. "This horse," said I to myself,『had a
  tail three feet and a half long, and, lashing it from one side
  to the other, he has swept away the dust.』Branches of the trees
  met overhead at the height of five feet, and under them I saw
  newly fallen leaves; so I knew that the horse had brushed some
  of the branches, and was therefore five feet high. As to his
  bit, it must have been made of twenty-three carat gold, for he
  had rubbed it against a stone, which turned out to be a
  touchstone, with the properties of which I am familiar by
  experiment. Lastly, by the marks which his shoes left upon
  pebbles of another kind, I was led to think that his shoes were
  of fine silver.'

  "All the judges admired Zadig's profound and subtle discernment;
  and the fame of it reached even the King and the Queen. From the
  ante-rooms to the presence-chamber, Zadig's name was in
  everybody's mouth; and, although many of the magi were of
  opinion that he ought to be burnt as a sorcerer, the King
  commanded that the four hundred ounces of gold which he had been
  fined should be restored to him. So the officers of the court
  went in state with the four hundred ounces; only they retained
  three hundred and ninety-eight for legal expenses, and their
  servants expected fees."

  Those who are interested in learning more of the fateful history
  of Zadig must turn to the original; we are dealing with him only
  as a philosopher, and this brief excerpt suffices for the
  exemplification of the nature of his conclusions and of the
  methods by which he arrived at them.

These conclusions may be said to be of the nature of retrospective  prophecies; though it is perhaps a little hazardous to employ phraseology  which perilously suggests a contradiction in termsthe word  "prophecy" being so constantly, in ordinary use, restricted to  "foretelling." Strictly, however, the term prophecy applies as much to  outspeaking as to foretelling; and, even in the restricted sense of  "divination," it is obvious that the essence of the prophetic operation  does not lie in its backward or forward relation to the course of time,  but in the fact that it is the apprehension of that which lies out of the  sphere of immediate knowledge; the seeing of that which, to the natural  sense of the seer, is invisible.  

The foreteller asserts that, at some future time, a properly situated  observer will witness certain events; the clairvoyant declares that, at  this present time, certain things are to be witnessed a thousand miles  away; the retrospective prophet (would that there were such a word as  "backteller!") affirms that, so many hours or years ago, such and such  things were to be seen. In all these cases, it is only the relation to  time which altersthe process of divination beyond the limits of  possible direct knowledge remains the same.  

No doubt it was their instinctive recognition of the analogy between  Zadig's results and those obtained by authorised inspiration which  inspired the Babylonian magi with the desire to burn the philosopher.  Zadig admitted that he had never either seen or heard of the horse of the  king or of the spaniel of the queen; and yet he ventured to assert in the  most positive manner that animals answering to their description did  actually exist and ran about the plains of Babylon. If his method was good  for the divination of the course of events ten hours old, why should it  not be good for those of ten years or ten centuries past; nay, might it  not extend ten thousand years and justify the impious in meddling with the  traditions of Oannes and the fish, and all the sacred foundations of  Babylonian cosmogony?  

But this was not the worst. There was another consideration which  obviously dictated to the more thoughtful of the magi the propriety of  burning Zadig out of hand. His defence was worse than his offence. It  showed that his mode of divination was fraught with danger to magianism in  general. Swollen with the pride of human reason, he had ignored the  established canons of magian lore; and, trusting to what after all was  mere carnal common sense, he professed to lead men to a deeper insight  into nature than magian wisdom, with all its lofty antagonism to  everything common, had ever reached. What, in fact, lay at the foundation  of all Zadig's argument but the coarse commonplace assumption, upon which  every act of our daily lives is based, that we may conclude from an effect  to the pre-existence of a cause competent to produce that effect?  

The tracks were exactly like those which dogs and horses leave; therefore  they were the effects of such animals as causes. The marks at the sides of  the fore-prints of the dog track were exactly such as would be produced by  long trailing ears; therefore the dog's long ears were the causes of these  marksand so on. Nothing can be more hopelessly vulgar, more unlike  the majestic development of a system of grandly unintelligible conclusions  from sublimely inconceivable premisses such as delights the magian heart.  In fact, Zadig's method was nothing but the method of all mankind.  Retrospective prophecies, far more astonishing for their minute accuracy  than those of Zadig, are familiar to those who have watched the daily life  of nomadic people.  

From freshly broken twigs, crushed leaves, disturbed pebbles, and imprints  hardly discernible by the untrained eye, such graduates in the University  of Nature will divine, not only the fact that a party has passed that way,  but its strength, its composition, the course it took, and the number of  hours or days which have elapsed since it passed. But they are able to do  this because, like Zadig, they perceive endless minute differences where  untrained eyes discern nothing; and because the unconscious logic of  common sense compels them to account for these effects by the causes which  they know to be competent to produce them.  

And such mere methodised savagery was to discover the hidden things of  nature better than a priori deductions from the nature of Ormuzdperhaps  to give a history of the past, in which Oannes would be altogether  ignored! Decidedly it were better to burn this man at once.  

If instinct, or an unwonted use of reason, led Moabdar's magi to this  conclusion two or three thousand years ago, all that can be said is that  subsequent history has fully justified them. For the rigorous application  of Zadig's logic to the results of accurate and long-continued observation  has founded all those sciences which have been termed historical or  palaetiological, because they are retrospectively prophetic and strive  towards the reconstruction in human imagination of events which have  vanished and ceased to be.  

History, in the ordinary acceptation of the word, is based upon the  interpretation of documentary evidence; and documents would have no  evidential value unless historians were justified in their assumption that  they have come into existence by the operation of causes similar to those  of which documents are, in our present experience, the effects. If a  written history can be produced otherwise than by human agency, or if the  man who wrote a given document was actuated by other than ordinary human  motives, such documents are of no more evidential value than so many  arabesques.  

Archaeology, which takes up the thread of history beyond the point at  which documentary evidence fails us, could have no existence, except for  our well grounded confidence that monuments and works of art or artifice,  have never been produced by causes different in kind from those to which  they now owe their origin. And geology, which traces back the course of  history beyond the limits of archaeology, could tell us nothing except for  the assumption that, millions of years ago, water, heat, gravitation,  friction, animal and vegetable life, caused effects of the same kind as  they now cause. Nay, even physical astronomy, in so far as it takes us  back to the uttermost point of time which palaetiological science can  reach, is founded upon the same assumption. If the law of gravitation ever  failed to be true, even to a small extent, for that period, the  calculations of the astronomer have no application.  

The power of prediction, of prospective prophecy, is that which is  commonly regarded as the great prerogative of physical science. And truly  it is a wonderful fact that one can go into a shop and buy for a small  price a book, the "Nautical Almanac," which will foretell the exact  position to be occupied by one of Jupiter's moons six months hence; nay,  more, that, if it were worth while, the Astronomer-Royal could furnish us  with as infallible a prediction applicable to 1980 or 2980.  

But astronomy is not less remarkable for its power of retrospective  prophecy.  

Thales, oldest of Greek philosophers, the dates of whose birth and death  are uncertain, but who flourished about 600 B.C., is said to have foretold  an eclipse of the sun which took place in his time during a battle between  the Medes and the Lydians. Sir George Airy has written a very learned and  interesting memoir 2in which he proves that such an  eclipse was visible in Lydia on the afternoon of the 28th of May in the  year 585 B.C.  

No one doubts that, on the day and at the hour mentioned by the  Astronomer-Royal, the people of Lydia saw the face of the sun totally  obscured. But, though we implicitly believe this retrospective prophecy,  it is incapable of verification. In the total absence of historical  records, it is impossible even to conceive any means of ascertaining  directly whether the eclipse of Thales happened or not. All that can be  said is, that the prospective prophecies of the astronomer are always  verified; and that, inasmuch as his retrospective prophecies are the  result of following backwards, the very same method as that which  invariably leads to verified results, when it is worked forwards, there is  as much reason for placing full confidence in the one as in the other.  Retrospective prophecy is therefore a legitimate function of astronomical  science; and if it is legitimate for one science it is legitimate for all;  the fundamental axiom on which it rests, the constancy of the order of  nature, being the common foundation of all scientific thought. Indeed, if  there can be grades in legitimacy, certain branches of science have the  advantage over astronomy, in so far as their retrospective prophecies are  not only susceptible of verification, but are sometimes strikingly  verified.  

Such a science exists in that application of the principles of biology to  the interpretation of the animal and vegetable remains imbedded in the  rocks which compose the surface of the globe, which is called  Palaeontology.  

At no very distant time, the question whether these so-called "fossils,"  were really the remains of animals and plants was hotly disputed. Very  learned persons maintained that they were nothing of the kind, but a sort  of concretion, or crystallisation, which had taken place within the stone  in which they are found; and which simulated the forms of animal and  vegetable life, just as frost on a window-pane imitates vegetation. At the  present day, it would probably be impossible to find any sane advocate of  this opinion; and the fact is rather surprising, that among the people  from whom the circle-squarers, perpetual-motioners, flat-earthed men and  the like, are recruited, to say nothing of table-turners and  spirit-rappers, somebody has not perceived the easy avenue to nonsensical  notoriety open to any one who will take up the good old doctrine, that  fossils are all lusus naturae.  

The position would be impregnable, inasmuch as it is quite impossible to  prove the contrary. If a man choose to maintain that a fossil oyster  shell, in spite of its correspondence, down to every minutest particular,  with that of an oyster fresh taken out of the sea, was never tenanted by a  living oyster, but is a mineral concretion, there is no demonstrating his  error. All that can be done is to show him that, by a parity of reasoning,  he is bound to admit that a heap of oyster shells outside a fishmonger's  door may also be "sports of nature," and that a mutton bone in a dust-bin  may have had the like origin. And when you cannot prove that people are  wrong, but only that they are absurd, the best course is to let them  alone.  

The whole fabric of palaeontology, in fact, falls to the ground unless we  admit the validity of Zadig's great principle, that like effects imply  like causes, and that the process of reasoning from a shell, or a tooth,  or a bone, to the nature of the animal to which it belonged, rests  absolutely on the assumption that the likeness of this shell, or tooth, or  bone, to that of some animal with which we are already acquainted, is such  that we are justified in inferring a corresponding degree of likeness in  the rest of the two organisms. It is on this very simple principle, and  not upon imaginary laws of physiological correlation, about which, in most  cases, we know nothing whatever, that the so-called restorations of the  palaeontologist are based.  

Abundant illustrations of this truth will occur to every one who is  familiar with palaeontology; none is more suitable than the case of the  so-called Belemnites. In the early days of the study of fossils,  this name was given to certain elongated stony bodies, ending at one  extremity in a conical point, and truncated at the other, which were  commonly reputed to be thunderbolts, and as such to have descended from  the sky. They are common enough in some parts of England; and, in the  condition in which they are ordinarily found, it might be difficult to  give satisfactory reasons for denying them to be merely mineral bodies.  

They appear, in fact, to consist of nothing but concentric layers of  carbonate of lime, disposed in subcrystalline fibres, or prisms,  perpendicular to the layers. Among a great number of specimens of these  Belemnites, however, it was soon observed that some showed a conical  cavity at the blunt end; and, in still better preserved specimens, this  cavity appeared to be divided into chambers by delicate saucer-shaped  partitions, situated at regular intervals one above the other. Now there  is no mineral body which presents any structure comparable to this, and  the conclusion suggested itself that the Belemnites must be the effects of  causes other than those which are at work in inorganic nature. On close  examination, the saucer-shaped partitions were proved to be all perforated  at one point, and the perforations being situated exactly in the same  line, the chambers were seen to be traversed by a canal, or siphuncle,  which thus connected the smallest or aphical chamber with the largest.  There is nothing like this in the vegetable world; but an exactly  corresponding structure is met with in the shells of two kinds of existing  animals, the pearly Nautilus and the Spirula, and only in  them. These animals belong to the same divisionthe Cephalopodaas  the cuttle-fish, the squid, and the octopus. But they are the only  existing members of the group which possess chambered, siphunculated  shells; and it is utterly impossible to trace any physiological connection  between the very peculiar structural characters of a cephalopod and the  presence of a chambered shell. In fact, the squid has, instead of any such  shell, a horny "pen," the cuttlefish has the so-called "cuttle-bone," and  the octopus has no shell, or, at most, a mere rudiment of one.  

Nevertheless, seeing that there is nothing in nature at all like the  chambered shell of the Belemnite, except the shells of the Nautilus  and of the Spirula, it was legitimate to prophesy that the animal  from which the fossil proceeded must have belonged to the group of the Cephalopoda.  Nautilus and Spirula are both very rare animals, but the  progress of investigation brought to light the singular fact, that, though  each has the characteristic cephalopodous organisation, it is very  different from the other. The shell of Nautilus is external, that  of Spirula internal; Nautilus has four gills, Spirula  two; Nautilus has multitudinous tentacles, Spirula has only  ten arms beset with horny-rimmed suckers; Spirula, like the squids  and cuttle-fishes, which it closely resembles, has a bag of ink which it  squirts out to cover its retreat when alarmed; Nautilus has none.  

No amount of physiological reasoning could enable any one to say whether  the animal which fabricated the Belemnite was more like Nautilus,  or more like Spirula. But the accidental discovery of Belemnites in  due connection with black elongated masses which were: certainly  fossilised ink-bags, inasmuch as the ink could be ground up and used for  painting as well as if it were recent sepia, settled the question; and it  became perfectly safe to prophesy that the creature which fabricated the  Belemnite was a two-gilled cephalopod with suckers on its arms, and with  all the other essential features of our living squids, cuttle-fishes, and  Spirulae. The palaeontologist was, by this time, able to speak as  confidently about the animal of the Belemnite, as Zadig was respecting the  queen's spaniel. He could give a very fair description of its external  appearance, and even enter pretty fully into the details of its internal  organisation, and yet could declare that neither he, nor any one else, had  ever seen one. And as the queen's spaniel was found, so happily has the  animal of the Belemnite; a few exceptionally preserved specimens have been  discovered, which completely verify the retrospective prophecy of those  who interpreted the facts of the case by due application of the method of  Zadig.  

These Belemnites flourished in prodigious abundance in the seas of the  mesozoic, or secondary, age of the world's geological history; but no  trace of them has been found in any of the tertiary deposits, and they  appear to have died out towards the close of the mesozoic epoch. The  method of Zadig, therefore, applies in full force to the events of a  period which is immeasurably remote, which long preceded the origin of the  most conspicuous mountain masses of the present world, and the deposition,  at the bottom of the ocean, of the rocks which form the greater part of  the soil of our present continents. The Euphrates itself, at the mouth of  which Oannes landed, is a thing of yesterday compared with a Belemnite;  and even the liberal chronology of magian cosmogony fixes the beginning of  the world only at a time when other applications of Zadig's method afford  convincing evidence that, could we have been there to see, things would  have looked very much as they do now. Truly the magi were wise in their  generation; they foresaw rightly that this pestilent application of the  principles of common sense, inaugurated by Zadig, would be their ruin.  

But it may be said that the method of Zadig, which is simple reasoning  from analogy, does not account for the most striking feats of modern  palaeontologythe reconstruction of entire animals from a tooth or  perhaps a fragment of a bone; and it may be justly urged that Cuvier, the  great master of this kind of investigation, gave a very different account  of the process which yielded such remarkable results.  

Cuvier is not the first man of ability who has failed to make his own  mental processes clear to himself, and he will not be the last. The matter  can be easily tested. Search the eight volumes of theRecherches sur les  Ossemens Fossilesfrom cover to cover, and nothing but the application of  the method of Zadig will be found in the arguments by which a fragment of  a skeleton is made to reveal the characters of the animal to which it  belonged.  

There is one well-known case which may represent all. It is an excellent  illustration of Cuvier's sagacity, and he evidently takes some pride in  telling his story about it. A split slab of stone arrived from the  quarries of Montmartre, the two halves of which contained the greater part  of the skeleton of a small animal. On careful examinations of the  characters of the teeth and of the lower jaw, which happened to be  exposed, Cuvier assured himself that they presented such a very close  resemblance to the corresponding parts in the living opossums that he at  once assigned the fossil to that genus.  

Now the opossums are unlike most mammals in that they possess two bones  attached to the fore part of the pelvis, which are commonly called  "marsupial bones." The name is a misnomer, originally conferred because it  was thought that these bones have something to do with the support of the  pouch, or marsupium, with which some, but not all, of the opossums are  provided. As a matter of fact, they have nothing to do with the support of  the pouch, and they exist as much in those opossums which have no pouches  as in those which possess them. In truth, no one knows what the use of  these bones may be, nor has any valid theory of their physiological import  yet been suggested. And if we have no knowledge of the physiological  importance of the bones themselves, it is obviously absurd to pretend that  we are able to give physiological reasons why the presence of these bones  is associated with certain peculiarities of the teeth and of the jaws. If  any one knows why four molar teeth and an inflected angle of the jaw are  very generally found along with marsupial bones, he has not yet  communicated that knowledge to the world.  

If, however, Zadig was right in concluding from the likeness of the  hoof-prints which he observed to be a horse's that the creature which made  them had a tail like that of a horse, Cuvier, seeing that the teeth and  jaw of his fossil were just like those of an opossum, had the same right  to conclude that the pelvis would also be like an opossum's; and so strong  was his conviction that this retrospective prophecy, about an animal which  he had never seen before, and which had been dead and buried for millions  of years, would be verified, that he went to work upon the slab which  contained the pelvis in confident expectation of finding and laying bare  the "marsupial bones," to the satisfaction of some persons whom he had  invited to witness their disinterment. As he says:"Cette operation  se fit en presence de quelques personnes a qui j'en avais annonce d'avance  le resultat, dans l'intention de leur prouver par le fait la justice de  nos theories zoologiques; puisque le vrai cachet d'une theorie est sans  contredit la faculte qu'elle donne de prevoir les phenomenes."  

In the "Ossemens Fossiles" Cuvier leaves his paper just as it first  appeared in the "Annales du Museum," as "a curious monument of the force  of zoological laws and of the use which may be made of them."  

Zoological laws truly, but not physiological laws. If one sees a live  dog's head, it is extremely probable that a dog's tail is not far off,  though nobody can say why that sort of head and that sort of tail go  together; what physiological connection there is between the two. So, in  the case of the Montmartre fossil, Cuvier, finding a thorough opossum's  head, concluded that the pelvis also would be like an opossum's. But, most  assuredly, the most advanced physiologist of the present day could throw  no light on the question why these are associated, nor could pretend to  affirm that the existence of the one is necessarily connected with that of  the other. In fact, had it so happened that the pelvis of the fossil had  been originally exposed, while the head lay hidden, the presence of the  "marsupial bones," though very like an opossum's, would by no means have  warranted the prediction that the skull would turn out to be that of the  opossum. It might just as well have been like that of some other  marsupial; or even like that of the totally different group of Monotremes,  of which the only living representatives are the Echidna and the Ornithorhynchus.  

For all practical purposes, however, the empirical laws of co-ordination  of structures, which are embodied in the generalisations of morphology,  may be confidently trusted, if employed with due caution, to lead to a  just interpretation of fossil remains; or, in other words, we may look for  the verification of the retrospective prophecies which are based upon  them.  

And if this be the case, the late advances which have been made in  palaeontological discovery open out a new field for such prophecies. For  it has been ascertained with respect to many groups of animals, that, as  we trace them back in time, their ancestors gradually cease to exhibit  those special modifications which at present characterise the type, and  more nearly embody the general plan of the group to which they belong.  

Thus, in the well-known case of the horse, the toes which are suppressed  in the living horse are found to be more and more complete in the older  members of the group, until, at the bottom of the Tertiary series of  America, we find an equine animal which has four toes in front and three  behind. No remains of the horse tribe are at present known from any  Mesozoic deposit. Yet who can doubt that, whenever a sufficiently  extensive series of lacustrine and fluviatile beds of that age becomes  known, the lineage which has been traced thus far will be continued by  equine quadrupeds with an increasing number of digits, until the horse  type merges in the five-toed form towards which these gradations point?  

But the argument which holds good for the horse, holds good, not only for  all mammals, but for the whole animal world. And as the study of the  pedigrees, or lines of evolution, to which, at present, we have access,  brings to light, as it assuredly will do, the laws of that process, we  shall be able to reason from the facts with which the geological record  furnishes us to those which have hitherto remained, and many of which,  perhaps, may for ever remain, hidden. The same method of reasoning which  enables us, when furnished with a fragment of an extinct animal, to  prophesy the character which the whole organism exhibited, will, sooner or  later, enable us, when we know a few of the later terms of a genealogical  series, to predict the nature of the earlier terms.  

In no very distant future, the method of Zadig, applied to a greater body  of facts than the present generation is fortunate enough to handle, will  enable the biologist to reconstruct the scheme of life from its beginning,  and to speak as confidently of the character of long extinct beings, no  trace of which has been preserved, as Zadig did of the queen's spaniel and  the king's horse. Let us hope that they may be better rewarded for their  toil and their sagacity than was the Babylonian philosopher; for perhaps,  by that time, the magi also may be reckoned among the members of a  forgotten Fauna, extinguished in the struggle for existence against their  great rival, common sense.  














FOOTNOTES:  



1 (return)
 [Discours sur les  revolutions de la surface du globe.Recherches sur les Ossemens  Fossiles, Ed. iv, t.i. p.185.]  


2 (return)
 [On the Eclipses of  Agathocles, Thales, and Xerxes,Philosophical Transactions, vol.  cxliii.]  



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