edge could tend to nothing but the increase of a man's own welfare and the good of his fellow-men. But Zadig was fated to experience the vanity of such expectations.

One day, walking near a little wood, he saw, hastening that way, one of the Queen's chief eunuchs, followed by a troop of officials, who appeared to be in the greatest anxiety, running hither and thither like men distraught, in search of some lost treasure.

"Young man," cried the eunuch, "have you seen the Queen's dog?" Zadig answered modestly, "A bitch, I think, not a dog." "Quite right," replied the eunuch; and Zadig continued, " A very small spaniel who has lately had puppies; she limps with the left foreleg, and has very long ears." "Ah! you have seen her then," said the breathless eunuch. "No," answered Zadig, "I have not seen her; and I really was not aware that the Queen possessed a spaniel."

By an odd coincidence, at the very same time, the handsomest horse in the King's stables broke away from his groom in the Babylonian plains. The grand huntsman and all his staff were seeking the horse with as much anxiety as the eunuch and his people the spaniel; and the grand huntsman asked Zadig if he had not seen the King's horse go that way.

"A first-rate galloper, small-hoofed, five feet high; tail three feet and a half long; cheek pieces of the bit of twenty-three carat gold; shoes silver?" said Zadig.

"Which way did he go? Where is he?" cried the grand hunts

man.

"I have not seen anything of the horse, and I never heard of him before," replied Zadig.

mitted to open his defence to the court, which he did in the following terms:

"Stars of justice, abysses of knowledge, mirrors of truth, whose gravity is as that of lead, whose inflexibility is as that of iron, who rival the diamond in clearness, and possess no little affinity with gold; since I am permitted to address your august assembly, I swear by Ormuzd that I have never seen the respectable lady dog of the queen, nor beheld the sacrosanct horse of the King of Kings.

"This is what happened. I was taking a walk towards the little wood near which I subsequently had the honour to meet the venerable chief eunuch and the most illustrious grand huntsman. I noticed the track of an animal in the sand, and it was easy to see that it was that of a small dog. Long faint streaks upon the little elevations of sand between the footmarks convinced me that it was a she dog with pendent dugs, showing that she must have had puppies not many days since. Other scrapings of the sand, which always lay close to the marks of the forepaws, indicated that she had very long ears; and, as the imprint of one foot was always fainter than those of the other three, I judged that the lady dog of our august Queen was, if I may venture to say so, a little lame.

"With respect to the horse of the King of Kings, permit me to observe that, wandering through the paths which traverse the wood, I noticed the marks of horse-shoes. They were all equidistant. 'Ah!' said I, 'this is a famous galloper.' In a narrow alley, only seven feet wide, the dust upon the trunks of the trees was a little disturbed at three feet and a half from the middle of the path. This horse,' said I to myself, 'had a tail three feet and a half long, and, lashing it from one side to the other, he has swept away the dust.' Branches of the trees met overhead at the height of five feet, and under them I saw newly fallen leaves; so I knew that the horse had brushed some of the branches, and was therefore five feet high. As to his bit, it must have been made of twentythree carat gold, for he had rubbed it against a stone, which turned out to be a touchstone, with the properties of which I am familiar by experiment. Lastly, by the marks which his shoes left upon pebbles of another kind, I was led to think that his shoes were of fine silver."

All the judges admired Zadig's profound and subtle discernment; and the fame of it reached even the King and the Queen. From the ante-rooms to the presence-chamber, Zadig's name was in everybody's mouth; and, although many of the magi were of opinion that he ought to be burnt as a sorcerer, the King commanded that the four hundred ounces of gold which he had been fined should be restored to him. So the officers of the court went in state with the four hundred ounces; only they retained three hundred and ninety-eight for legal expenses, and their servants expected fees.

Those who are interested in learning more of the fateful history of Zadig must turn to the original; we are dealing with him only as a philosopher, and this brief excerpt suffices for the exemplification of the nature of his conclusions and of the method by which he arrived at them.

These conclusions may be said to be of the nature of retrospective prophecies; though it is perhaps a little hazardous to employ phraseology which perilously suggests a contradiction in terms-the word "prophecy" being so constantly in ordinary use restricted to "foretelling." Strictly, however, the term prophecy as much applies to outspeaking as to foretelling; and, even in the restricted sense of "divination," it is obvious that the essence of the prophetic operation does not lie in its backward or forward relation to the course of time, but in the fact that it is the apprehension of that which lies out of the sphere of immediate knowledge; the seeing of that which to the natural sense of the seer is invisible.

The foreteller asserts that, at some future time, a properly situated observer will witness certain events; the clairvoyant declares that, at this present time, certain things are to be witnessed a thousand miles away; the retrospective prophet (would that there were such a word as "backteller!") affirms that so many hours or years ago, such and such things were to be seen. In all these cases, it is only the relation to time which alters the process of divination beyond the limits of possible direct knowledge remains the same.

No doubt it was their instinctive recognition of the analogy between Zadig's results and those obtained by authorised inspiration which inspired the Babylonian magi with the desire to burn the philosopher. Zadig admitted that he had never either seen or heard of the horse of the king or of the spaniel of the queen; and yet he ventured to assert in the most positive manner that animals answering to their description did actually exist, and ran about the plains of Babylon. If his method was good for the divination of the course of events ten hours old, why should it not be good for those of ten years or ten centuries past; nay, might it not extend to ten thousand years and justify the impious in meddling with the traditions of Oannes and the fish, and all the sacred foundations of Babylonian cosmogony?

But this was not the worst. There was another consideration which obviously dictated to the more thoughtful of the magi the propriety of burning Zadig out of hand. His defence was worse than his offence. It showed that his mode of divination was fraught with danger to magianism in general. Swollen with the pride of human reason, he had ignored the established canons of magian lore; and, trusting to what after all was mere carnal common sense, he professed to lead men to a deeper insight into nature than magian wisdom, with all its lofty antagonism to everything common, had ever reached. What, in fact, lay at the foundation of all Zadig's arguments but the coarse commonplace assumption, upon which every act of our daily lives is based, that we may conclude from an effect to the pre-existence of a cause competent to produce that effect?

The tracks were exactly like those which dogs and horses leave; therefore they were the effects of such animals as causes. The marks at the sides of the fore prints of the dog track were exactly such as would be produced by long trailing ears; therefore the dog's long ears were the causes of these marks-and so on. Nothing can be more hopelessly vulgar, more unlike the majestic development of a system of grandly unintelligible conclusions from sublimely inconceivable premisses, such as delights the magian heart. In fact, Zadig's method was nothing but the method of all mankind. Retrospective prophecies, far more astonishing for their minute accuracy than those of Zadig, are familiar to those who have watched the daily life of nomadic people.

From freshly broken twigs, crushed leaves, disturbed pebbles, and imprints hardly discernible by the untrained eye, such graduates in the University of Nature will divine, not only the fact that a party has passed that way, but its strength, its composition, the course it took,