26 THE NEANDERTHAL SKULL. 



derful metamorphosis into humanity."* I 

 am inclined to think that your noted lay 

 preacher has been here rather guilty of a 

 plagiarism, as Aquileius of old tells you in 

 his book of the Golden Ass, that on one 

 occasion, when drinking a "certain potion, 

 he had been transubstantiated into an ass, 

 while at the same time he retained his 

 human mind. And so Giraldus, whom I 

 have before quoted, declares that he had 

 seen " persons who by magical arts turned 

 any substance about them into fat pigs, as 

 they appeared, though always of a red 

 colour, and sold them in the markets, "f 



A countryman of Gerard's, BENOIT DE 

 MAILLET, Consul - General of France in 

 Egypt, during the reign of Louis XIV., in 

 his work Telliamed, improves upon Gerard's 

 theory of evolving the bernacle goose from 

 rotten timber, as he argues that the whole 

 tribe of birds once existed as marine animals, 

 which on being thrown ashore by the waves 

 had got feathers by accident, and that 



* Huxley's Lay Sermons, p. 146. 



f Topography of Ireland, Diet, ii., ch. xix. 



