Explore "Mr. Pottermack's Oversight" by R. Austin Freeman on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
"Your legal friend," Mr. Pottermack said at length, "must be a man of extraordinary subtlety and ingenuity if he deduced all that you have told me from the mere peculiarities of a set of footprints, and only photographs at that. But what strikes me about it is that his reconstruction was, after all, pure speculation. There were too many 'ifs."
"But, my dear Mr. Pottermack," exclaimed Thorndyke, "it was all 'ifs. ' The whole train of reasoning was on the plane of hypothesis, pure and simple. He did not, at this stage, assume that it was actually true, but merely true conditionally on the facts being what they appeared to be. But what does a scientific man do when he sets up a working hypothesis? He deduces from it its consequences, and he continues to pursue these so long as they are consistent with the facts known to him. Sooner or later, this process brings him either to an impossibility or a contradiction -- in which case he abandons the hypothesis -- or to a question of fact which is capable of being settled conclusively, yes or no.