 A genuine test-case for Occam’s Razor must involve an ontologically parsimonious theory which is not clearly superior to its rivals in other respects. An instructive example is the following historical episode from biogeography, a scientific subdiscipline which originated towards the end of the 18th Century, and whose central purpose was to explain the geographical distribution of plant and animal  species.[12]  In 1761, the French naturalist Buffon proposed the following law;