14:6 ON THE METHOD OF ZADIG. 



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 con- 

 cretion, there is no demonstrating his error. All that 

 can be done is to show him that, by a parity of reason- 

 ing, he is bound to admit that a heap of oyster shells 

 outside a fishmonger's door may also be " sports of na- 

 ture," 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 physio- 

 logical 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 



