Thomas Henry Huxley takes Voltaire’s Zadig, who deduced a lame dog and a runaway horse he had never seen from their tracks, as the model for what he calls retrospective prophecy. Science, he argues, reasons from present traces to past events, and palaeontology reconstructs vanished creatures from their fossils by exactly that method.
A sparkling short essay on scientific reasoning by Darwin’s great defender. Download the free EPUB.