Curiosities of Science. 141 



dred copies of the engraving to New Zealand, in the hope of their being 

 distributed and leading to interesting results, he patiently waited for 

 three years, viz. till the year 1842, when he received intelligence 

 from Dr. Buckland, at Oxford, that a great box, just arrived from New 

 Zealand, consigned to himself, was on its way, unopened, to Professor 

 Owen, who found it filled with bones, palpably of a bird, one of which 

 bones was three feet in length, and much more than double the size of 

 any bone in the ostrich ! 



And out of the contents of this box the Professor was positively en- 

 abled to articulate almost the entire skeleton of a huge wingless bird 

 between TEN and ELEVEN feet in height, its bony structure in strict con- 

 formity with the fragment in question ; and that skeleton may at any 

 time be seen at the Museum of the College of Surgeons, towering over, 

 and nearly twice the height of, the skeleton of an ostrich ; and at its feet 

 lying the old bone from which alone consummate anatomical science had 

 deduced such an astounding reality, the existence of an enormous ex- 

 tinct creature of the bird kind, in an island where previously no bird 

 had been known to exist larger than a pheasant or a common fowl t 

 Lecture on tke Moral and Intellectual Development of the present Age.* 



"THE MAESTEICHT SAUKIAN FOSSIL" A FRAUD. 



In 1795, there was stated to have been discovered in the 

 stone quarries adjoining Maestricht the remains of the gigan- 

 tic Mosoesaurus (Saurian of the Meuse), an aquatic reptile about 

 twenty-five feet long, holding an intermediate place between 

 the Monitors and Iguanas. It appears to have had webbed feet, 

 and a tail of such construction as to have served for a powerful 

 oar, and enabled the animal to stem the waves of the ocean, of 

 which Cuvier supposed it to have been an inhabitant. It is 

 thus referred to by Dr. Mantell, in his Medals of Creation : "A 

 specimen, with the jaws and bones of the palate, now in the 

 Museum at Paris, has long been celebrated ; and is still the most 

 precious relic of this extinct reptile hitherto discovered." An 

 admirable cast of this specimen is preserved in the British Mu- 

 seum, in a case near the bones of the Iguanodon. This is, how- 

 ever, useless, as Cuvier is proved to have been imposed upon in 

 the matter. 



M. Schlegel has reported to the French Academy of Sciences, that 

 he has ascertained beyond all doubt that the famous fossil saurian of 

 the quarries of Maestricht, described as a wonderful curiosity by Cuvier, 

 is nothing more than an impudent fraud. Some bold impostor, it seems, 

 in order to make money, placed a quantity of bones in the quarries in 

 such a way as to give them the appearance of having been recently dug 

 up, and then passed them off as specimens of antediluvian creation. 

 Being successful in this, he went the length of arranging a number of 

 bones so as to represent an entire skeleton ; and had thus deceived the 



* According to the law of correlation, so much insisted on by Cuvier, a supe- 

 rior character implies the existence of its inferiors, and that too in definite pro- 

 portions and constant connections ; so that we need only the assurance of one 

 character, to be able to reconstruct the whole animal. The triumph of this system 

 is seen in the reconstruction of extinct animals, as in the above case of the Di- 

 norais, accomplished by Professor Owen. 



