My Contemporaries in Fiction by David Christie Murray

In the combined spelling and reading book which was in use in schools more than forty years ago there was printed a story to the following effect: -- Certain Arabs had lost a camel, and in the course of their wanderings in search of him they met a dervish, whom they questioned. The dervish answered by offering questions on his own side. 'Was your camel lame in one foot? ' he began. 'Yes,' said the owners. 'Was he blind in one eye? ' he continued. 'Yes,' said the owners again. 'Had he lost a front tooth? ' 'Yes,' 'Was he laden with corn on one side and with honey on the other? ' 'Yes, yes, yes. This is our camel. Where have you seen him? ' The dervish answered: 'I have never seen him. ' The Arabs, not without apparent reason, suspected the dervish of playing with them, and were about to chastise him, when the holy man asked for a hearing. Having secured it, he explained. He had seen the track of the camel.

He had known the animal to be lame of one foot because that foot left a slighter impression than the others upon the dust of the road. He had argued it blind of one eye because it had cropped the herbage on one side of the road alone. He knew it to have lost a tooth because of the gap left in the centre of its bite. Bees and flies argued honey on one side of the beast, and ants carrying wheat grains argued wheat on the other. The name of this observant and synthetic-minded dervish was not Sherlock Holmes, but he had the method of that famous detective, and in a sense anticipated the plots of all the stories which Dr. Conan Doyle has so effectively related of him. Possibly the best stories in the world which depend for their interest on this kind of induction are Edgar Allan Poe's.