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
palaeontology--the 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 the "Recherches
sur les Ossemens Fossiles" from 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