On the Method of Zadig

Thomas Henry Huxley wrote On the Method of Zadig, labelled essay #1 from Science and Hebrew Tradition. The essay says it is a usual and a commendable practice to preface the discussion of the views of a philosophic thinker by some account of the man, and adds that little is known about Zadig.

The essay quotes an exchange in which a eunuch asks, "have you seen the Queen's dog?" and Zadig answers modestly, "A bitch, I think, not a dog." The essay names Palaeontology as the application of the principles of biology to the interpretation of the animal and vegetable remains imbedded in the rocks which compose the surface of the globe, and says the question whether so-called fossils were really the remains of animals and plants was hotly disputed at no very distant time. The essay says no remains of the horse tribe are at present known from any Mesozoic deposit, and asks 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.