CHAPTER VIII 

 ICHTHYOSAURIA 



Early in the eighteenth century a curious work in the Latin 

 language was published by a famous physician and naturalist — a 

 professor in the University of Altorf by the name of Scheuchzer— 

 entitled Querulae Piscium, or "Complaints of the Fishes." The 

 work was illustrated by many expensively engraved figures of vari- 

 ous fossil remains, including one of some vertebrae which the 

 author referred to as "the accursed race destroyed by the flood"! 

 The history of the finding of these famous bones is recorded by 

 Cuvier as follows: 



Scheuchzer, while walking one day with his friend Langhans in the vicinity 

 of Altorf, a village and university of Nuremburg, went to the vicinity of the 

 gallows to make some researches. Langhans, who had entered the inclosure 

 of the gallows, found a piece of limestone containing eight dorsal vertebrae, 

 of a black color and shining. Seized, says Scheuchzer, with a panic terror, 

 Langhans threw the fragment of limestone beyond the wall of the inclosure, 

 and Scheuchzer, picking it up, preserved two of the vertebrae which he believed 

 to be human, and which he figured in his book, Piscium Querulae. 



About the same time another observer by the name of Baier 

 discovered other and similar vertebrae in the vicinity of Altorf 

 which he described and figured as those of a fish; and there was 

 much earnest contention between Scheuchzer and Baier, as also 

 between their friends, as to their supposed nature. Scheuchzer's 

 figure was often cited as indubitable evidence of the destruction of 

 mankind by a universal flood, and it was not until nearly a century 

 later that Cuvier showed that the bones were really those of a 

 marine reptile. 



It must be recollected, in extenuation of so extraordinary a 

 blunder on the part of so learned a man as was Scheuchzer, who, 

 as a physician and professor, one would think ought to have been 

 able to distinguish between vertebrae so different as are those of an 

 ichthyosaur and a man, that, during all of the eighteenth century 



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