370 FAUNA ANTIQUA SIVALENSIS. 



another point of mucli interest connected with the mineral 

 condition of these remains to which I am desu'ons of calling 

 your attention. It may be in your recollection, sir, as well 

 as that of other members of the Society now present, that on 

 the first evening of the session, when our meeting opened so 

 auspiciously, with Professor Owen's great paper ontheDinornis 

 birds of New Zealand, it was suggested by myself, in regard 

 to the doubtful antiquity of those remains, that some aid 

 might be derived from chemical analysis, and ascertaining 

 the presence to any extent, or the absence, of fluorine in 

 the bones ; as it had been determined by some of the most 

 distinguished authorities in chemistry that fluorine frequently 

 exists in very large quantity in fossil bones, as compared 

 with recent ones ; that its presence had even been ascertamed 

 in the bones of Pompeii and Herculaneum ; and that it had 

 been found in the greatest abundance in the most ancient 

 remains. This suggestion was met with a very confident 

 assertion by another speaker — a grave and worshipful signor, 

 Mr. President — a pillar of the State, and the present head of 

 a sister Society, that the opinions and the j^'ofessed facts as 

 to the existence of fluorine in fossils were mere delusions ; the 

 baseless fabrics of an air vision, and deserving to be con- 

 signed to the bottomless gulf of oblivion, along with trans- 

 mutation and such like heresies. The general negation was 

 founded on a single affirmed experiment by Sir H. Davy, who 

 had failed to detect fluorine in some Ku-kdale cave bones. It 

 was satisfactory, under such circumstances, to find that one 

 was connected in the so-caUed delusions with some of the great- 

 est of modern chemists, such as Berzelius, Thenard, Yauque- 

 lin, &c. ; and it has been entered on the record of science as 

 an established fact. Fluorine has even been found to as 

 great an extent as 14 per cent, in the fossil bones of Anoplo- 

 therium from the Paris basin. I was naturally desirous to 

 ascertain how the case stood with the fossil bones from the 

 N. of India, and in numerous analyses which have been made 

 by my friend Mr. Middleton he has found it in every 

 instance in abundance. Here is the evidence, on a piece of 

 glass, in regard to its abundance in the fossil Tortoise. You 

 know, sir, to what strange uses the gravest things may be 

 turned. The philosophic Hamlet has traced the dust of 

 Alexander the Great tUl he landed it as a plug to the bunghole 

 of a beer barrel. In like manner, these tortoise remains, after 

 many thousand years of repose, have been pounded in a mortar, 

 stewed in a crucible, and so curiously dealt with as to be 

 made to distil, as it were, their most hidden humom-s for the 

 express purpose of engraving their own image on a plate of 

 glass. The prevailing idea in the artist's mind, judging 



