Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/491

Rh 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 toward 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 paleontology—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 no reasoning from physiological necessities—nothing but the application of the method of Zadig pure and simple—will be found.

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 opossum 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