86 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR, 



house, had spent week after week in painfully relieving it 

 from the mass, all Maestricht began to speak of it as some- 

 thing really wonderful. There is a cathedral on St Peter's 

 mountain, the mountain itself is church-land ; and the lazy 

 canon, awakened by the general talk, laid claim to poor Hoff- 

 mann's wonderful fossil as his property. He was lord of the 

 manor, he said, and the mountain and all that it contained 

 belonged to him. Hoffmann defended his fossil as he best 

 could in an expensive lawsuit ; but the judges found the law 

 clean against him ; the huge reptile head was declared to be 

 " treasure trove" escheat to the lord of the manor ; and Hoff- 

 mann, half broken-hearted, with but his labour and the law- 

 yer's bills for his pains, saw it transferred by rude hands from 

 its place in his museum, to the residence of the grasping 

 churchman. The huge fossil head experienced the fate of 

 Dr Chalmers' two hundred churches. Hoffmann was a phi- 

 losopher, however, and he continued to observe and collect 

 as before ; but he never found such another fossil ; and at 

 length, in the midst of his ingenious labours, the vital ener- 

 gies failed within him, and he broke down and died. The 

 useless canon lived on. The French Revolution broke out ; 

 the republican army invested Maestricht ; the batteries were 

 opened j and shot and shell fell thick on the devoted city. 

 But in one especial quarter there alighted neither shot nor 

 shell. All was safe around the canon's house. Ordinary 

 relics would have availed him nothing in the circumstances, 

 no, not " the three kings of Cologne," had he possessed the 

 three kings entire, or the jaw-bones of the " eleven thousand 

 virgins ;" but there was virtue in the jaw-bones of the Mosa- 

 saurus, and safety in their neighbourhood. The French sa- 

 vans, like all the other savans of Europe, had heard of Hoff- 

 mann's fossil, and the French artillery had been directed to 

 play wide of the place where it lay. Maestricht surrender- 

 ed ; the fossil was found secreted in a vault, and sent away 



