trees again produce fresh seeds, to grow into fresh trees, they
would have said, "The thing cannot be; it is contrary to nature."
And they would have been quite as right in saying so, as in saying
that most other things cannot be.

Or suppose again, that you had come, like M. Du Chaillu, a
traveller from unknown parts; and that no human being had ever seen
or heard of an elephant. And suppose that you described him to
people, and said, "This is the shape, and plan, and anatomy of the
beast, and of his feet, and of his trunk, and of his grinders, and
of his tusks, though they are not tusks at all, but two fore teeth
run mad; and this is the section of his skull, more like a mushroom
than a reasonable skull of a reasonable or unreasonable beast; and
so forth, and so forth; and though the beast (which I assure you I
have seen and shot) is first cousin to the little hairy coney of
Scripture, second cousin to a pig, and (I suspect) thirteenth or
fourteenth cousin to a rabbit, yet he is the wisest of all beasts,
and can do everything save read, write, and cast accounts." People
would surely have said, "Nonsense; your elephant is contrary to
nature;" and have thought you were telling stories--as the French
thought of Le Vaillant when he came back to Paris and said that he
had shot a giraffe; and as the king of the Cannibal Islands thought
of the English sailor, when he said that in his country water
turned to marble, and rain fell as feathers. They would tell you,
the more they knew of science, "Your elephant is an impossible
monster, contrary to the laws of comparative anatomy, as far as yet
known." To which you would answer the less, the more you thought.

Did not learned men, too, hold, till within the last twenty-five
years, that a flying dragon was an impossible monster? And do we