84 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



DENDRITES. 



By M. STANISLAS MEUNIER. 



THERE is a universal tendency to seek and sometimes to see in 

 the forms of objects around us representations of the human 

 figure or of animals and plants. Many interesting examples have 

 been recorded and pictured in La Nature of rocks and mountains 

 presenting resemblances to animated forms. We are quite ready 

 to discern in the clouds all sorts of personages ; and at periods 

 when superstition has been active, apparitions have been described, 

 the whole existence of which consisted of misinterpreted simple 

 resemblances. Stones have usually been considered especially 

 worthy of attention in this category ; in tubercles of sandstone 

 and nodules of flint it is easy to find features analogous with the 

 most various objects. A block of sandstone is exhibited in the 

 forest of Fontainebleau on which one willing to see it may recog- 

 nize a petrified knight on his horse, all of the natural size. A 

 nodule of sandstone was once brought to me in the geological 

 laboratory of the museum, on which the owner saw the portrait 

 of our Lord on the cross. Some persons are specially ingenious 

 in finding resemblances in flints ; and Boucher de Perthes admit- 

 ted into his Atlas of Celtic and Antediluvian Antiquities a whole 

 series of figures of imitative forms of that mineral. 



There is no limit to this line of curiosities. All sorts of sub- 

 jects may be found calves' heads, which are quite common, and 

 eyes, birds, fishes, detached hands, feet, and ears, and human pro- 

 files. A large flint was kept for a long time at Meudon, on which 

 everybody recognized the bust of Louis XIV. To such accidents 

 M. J. B. Robinet, in 1778, devoted a part of his ingenious Consid- 

 erations on the Efforts of Nature in trying to make Man (Con- 

 siderations sur les essais de la Nature qui apprend a faire 

 Vhomme). As we turn the leaves of this curious work we see 

 described, in distinct paragraphs, anthropocardites, representing 

 the heart of man ; encephalites, or brains ; crano'ides, or skulls ; 

 otites, or ear-stones ; leucophtlialmos, or white eyes ; chirites, or 

 hands ; stones representing a muscle, and even the olfactory 

 nerve, etc. 



The drawing of the distinction between fortuitous resemblances 

 and true fossils was protracted and made difficult by the fact that 

 the two forms are often mingled, sometimes associated in the 

 same specimen or originating in beds having the most essential 

 characteristics in common. 



Sometimes, for instance, fossils are reduced to the condition of 

 impressions squeezed between two beds of rock or between two 

 laminae of a schistose stone. Fishes and insects are found in this 



