26 HISTORY OF THE SCIENCE. 



Chateau de Chaumon, between the towns of Montricoux, 

 Serras, and St. Antoine, some bones were found, several of 

 which were broken by the workmen. A surgeon of Beaure- 

 paire, named Mazurier, informed of this discovery, possessed 

 himself of the bones, and contrived to turn them to good 

 account. He gave out that he had found them in a sepul- 

 chre, thirty feet in length, upon which were inscribed the 

 words " Teutobochus Rex" He added, that at the same 

 time he found fifty medals bearing the head of Marius. He 

 published these stories in a pamphlet, by means of which 

 the curiosity of the public being aroused, he exhibited, for 

 money, the bones of the pretended giant at Paris and other 

 cities. Gassendi mentions a Jesuit of Tournon as the 

 author of the pamphlet, and proves that the pretended 

 antique medals were fabricated, their inscriptions being in 

 Gothic letters instead of Roman. As for the bones, after 

 having been exhibited as above-mentioned, they were put by 

 in a chest at Bordeaux, and it was not till after the lapse of 

 two centuries, in destroying a theatre, "La Salle de Moliere" 

 a few years since, in that city, that these royal remains were 

 rediscovered, when they were recognised to be those of a 

 mastodon. The list of works cited by Cuvier as having been 

 written during this controversy is long and curious. 



The celebrated naturalist Scheuchzer, who, with very con- 

 siderable talents and attainments, possessed an equal share 

 of credulity, wrote a treatise on a fossil skeleton, under the 

 title of Homo Diluvii Testis et Theoscopos, the object of 

 which was to prove the remains in question to be those of 

 an individual who had been destroyed by the deluge, but 

 which Cuvier decided to belong to a salamander, of extinct 

 species and enormous size. A similar specimen is placed in 

 the British Museum (Mineral Gallery, room iii. case 1). 

 The accompanying illustration depicts the subject of Scheuch- 

 zer' a treatise. 



On the fall of the Roman empire, the natural sciences 

 were cultivated with some degree of success by the Orientals; 

 but we have no evidence that they acquired any further 

 knowledge of the structure of the earth than was possessed 

 by the Greeks and R/omans. 



After the revival of letters the phenomena of geology 

 began to engage the attention of the nations of the West. 



