CHAP. xi. FOSSIL MAN OF DENISE. 195 



high authority both as a palaeontologist and archaeologist.* 

 M. Pictet, after visiting Le Puy and investigating the site 

 of the alleged discovery, was satisfied that the fossil bones 

 belonged to the period of the last volcanic eruptions of Velay ; 

 but expressly stated in his important treatise on palaeontology 

 that this conclusion, though it might imply that man had 

 coexisted with the extinct elephant, did not draw with it the 

 admission that the human race was anterior in date to the 

 filling of the caverns of France and Belgium with the bones 

 of extinct mammalia.f 



At a meeting of the ' Scientific Congress ' of France, held 

 at Le Puy in 1856, the question of the age of the Denise 

 fossil bones was fully gone into, and in the report of their 

 proceedings published in that year, the opinions of some of 

 the most skilful osteologists respecting the point in con 

 troversy are recorded. The late Abbe Croizet, a most 

 experienced collector of fossil bones in the volcanic regions 

 of Central France, and an able naturalist, and the late M. 

 Laurillard, of Paris, who assisted Cuvier in modelling many 

 fossil bones, and in the arrangement of the museum of the 

 Jardin, declared their opinion that the specimen preserved in 

 the museum of Le Puy is no counterfeit. They believed the 

 human bones to have been enveloped by natural causes in 

 the tufaceous matrix in which we now see them. 



In the year 1859, Professor Hebert and M. Lartet visited 

 Le Puy, expressly to investigate the same specimen, and to 

 inquire into the authenticity of the bones and their geological 

 age. Later in the same year, I went myself to Le Puy, 

 having the same object in view, and had the good fortune to 

 meet there my friend Mr. Poulett Scrope, with whom I ex 

 amined the Montagne de Denise, where "a peasant related to 

 us how he had dug out the specimen with his own hands and 



* Bulletin de la Societe Geologique f Trait6 de Paleontologie, torn. i. 



de France, 1844, 1845, 1847. p. 152, 1853. 



o 2 



