lder
members of the group, until, at the bottom of the Tertiary series of
America, we find an equine animal which has four toes in front and three
behind. No remains of the horse tribe are at present known from any
Mesozoic deposit. Yet who can doubt that, whenever a sufficiently
extensive series of lacustrine and fluviatile beds of that age becomes
known, the lineage which has been traced thus far will be continued by
equine quadrupeds with an increasing number of digits, until the horse
type merges in the five-toed form towards which these gradations point?

But the argument which holds good for the horse, holds good, not only
for all mammals, but for the whole animal world. And as the study of the
pedigrees, or lines of evolution, to which, at present, we have access,
brings to light, as it assuredly will do, the laws of that process, we
shall be able to reason from the facts with which the geological record
furnishes us to those which have hitherto remained, and many of which,
perhaps, may for ever remain, hidden. The same method of reasoning which
enables us, when furnished with a fragment of an extinct animal, to
prophesy the character which the whole organism exhibited, will,
sooner or later, enable us, when we know a few of the later terms of a
genealogical series, to predict the nature of the earlier terms.

In no very distant future, the method of Zadig, applied to a greater
body of facts than the present generation is fortunate enough to handle,
will enable the biologist to reconstruct the scheme of life from its
beginning, and to speak as confidently of the character of long extinct
beings, no trace of which has been preserved, as Zadig did of the
queen's spaniel and the king's horse. Let us hope that they may
be better rewarded for their toil and their sagacity than was the
Babylonian philosopher; for perhaps, by that time, the magi also may
be reckoned among the members of a forgotten Fauna, extinguished in the
struggle for existence against their great rival, common sense.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: "Discours sur les revolutions de la surface du globe."
_Recherches sur les Ossemens Fossiles,_ Ed. iv, t.i. p.185.]

[Footnote 2: "On the Eclipses of Agathocles, Thales, and Xerxes,"
_Philosophical Transactions,_ vol. cxliii.]

End of Project Gutenberg's On the Method of Zadig, by Thomas Henry Huxley

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