196 AGE OF FOSSIL MAN OF DEMISE, CHAP. xi. 



in his own vineyard, not far from the summit of the volcano. I 

 employed a labourer to make under his directions some fresh 

 excavations, following up those which had been made a month 

 earlier by MM. Hebert and Lartet, in the hope of verifying 

 the true position of the fossils, but all of us without success. 

 We failed even to find in situ any exact counterpart of the 

 stone of the Le Puy Museum. 



The osseous remains of that specimen consist of a frontal 

 and some other parts of the skull, including the upper jaw 

 with teeth, both of an adult and young individual ; also a 

 radius, some lumbar vertebrae, and some metatarsal bones. 

 They are all embedded in a light porous tuff, resembling in 

 colour and mineral composition the ejectamenta of several of 

 the latest eruptions of Denise. But none of the bones pene 

 trate into another part of the same specimen, which consists 

 of a more compact rock thickly laminated. Nevertheless, I 

 agree with the Abbe Croizet and M. Aymard, that it is not 

 conceivable even that the less coherent part of the museum 

 specimen which envelopes the human bones should have been 

 artificially put together, whatever may have been the origin 

 of certain other slabs of tuff which were afterwards sold as 

 coming from the same place, and which also contained human 

 remains. Whether some of these were spurious or not is a 

 question more difficult to decide. One of them, now in the 

 possession of M. Pichot-Dumazel, an advocate of Le Puy, is 

 suspected of having had some plaster of Paris introduced into 

 it to bind the bones more firmly together in the loose vol 

 canic tuff. I was assured that a dealer in objects of natural 

 history at Le Puy had been in the habit of occasionally se 

 curing the cohesion in that manner of fragments of broken 

 bones, and the juxta-position of uninjured ones found free 

 and detachable in loose volcanic tuffs. From this to. the 

 fabrication of a factitious human fossil was, it is suggested, 

 but a short step. But in reference to M. Pichot's specimen, 



