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