The position would be impregnable, inasmuch as it is quite impossible to prove the contrary. If a man choose to maintain that a fossil oyster shell, in spite of its correspondence, down to every minutest particular, with that of an oyster fresh taken out of the sea, was never tenanted by a living oyster, but is a mineral concretion, there is no demonstrating his error. All that can be done is to show him that, by a parity of reasoning, he is bound to admit that a heap of oyster shells outside a fishmonger’s door may also be “sports of nature,” and that a mutton bone in a dust-bin may have had the like origin. And when you cannot prove that people are wrong, but only that they are absurd, the best course is to let them alone. The whole fabric of palæontology, in fact, falls to the ground unless we admit the validity of Zadig’s great principle, that like effects imply like causes; and that the process of reasoning from a shell, or a tooth, or a bone, to the nature of the animal to which it belonged, rests absolutely on the assumption that the likeness of this shell, or tooth, or bone, to that of some animal with which we are already acquainted, is such that we are justified in inferring a corresponding degree of likeness in the rest of the two organisms. It is on this very simple principle, and not upon imaginary laws of physiological correlation, about which, in most cases, we know nothing whatever, that the so-called restorations of the palæontologist are based. Abundant illustrations of this truth will occur to every one who is familiar with palæontology; none is more suitable than the case of the so-called _Belemnites_. In the early days of the study of fossils, this name was given to certain elongated stony bodies, ending at one extremity in a conical point, and truncated at the other, which were commonly reputed to be thunderbolts, and as such to have descended from the sky. They are common enough in some parts of England; and, in the condition in which they are ordinarily found, it might be difficult to give satisfactory reasons for denying them to be merely mineral bodies.