heir 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
Ormuzd--perhaps 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 geol