1 ON THE METHOD OF ZADIG 13 



one who will take up the good old doctrine, that 

 fossils are all lusus naturce. 



The position would be impregnable, inas- 

 much as it is quite impossible to prove the con- 

 trary. 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/ 7 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 



