348 FOSSIL REPTILES. 



There was even one very celebrated fragment, the history of 

 which proves with what levity of judgment naturalists, other- 

 wise of ability, have attributed to the human species fossil or 

 petrified bones. 



Scheuchzer, walking one day in the environs of Altorf, a 

 town and university in the territory of Nuremberg, with his 

 friend Langhans, went to make researches at the foot of the 

 Gibet. Langhans, who had penetrated into the inclosure, 

 found among the stones a piece of ash-coloured marble^ which 

 contained eight dorsal vertebrae, tinted black and of a brilliant 

 appearance. Seized, says Scheuchzer, with a panic terror, 

 Langhans threw this stone over the wall, and Scheuchzer hav- 

 ing taken it up^ kept two vertebrae, which he considered to be 

 human, and caused to be engraved in his Piscium Querelce, 

 He also tells this story to Bayer, on the occasion of two 

 similar vertebrae, probably from the same place, which he had 

 caused to be represented in his Oryctographia JVorica, pi. vi. 

 fig. 32, and Bayer had Scheuchzer*s letter printed in the sup- 

 plements to this Oryctography, which contain the sequel of his 

 description of his collections. 



These vertebrae, copied by Dargenville in his Oryctoloyie, 

 and quoted by Walch and many other describers of petrifac- 

 tions, have, until within a comparatively short time, passed, 

 without contradiction, for human bones. 



The slightest knowledge of osteology, however, or rather the 

 mere view of a human skeleton, would be sufficient to show that 

 these vertebrae could never have proceeded from man. They 

 might have been taken for those of crocodiles or fish. But 

 since the bones of the ichthyosaurus have been made known, 

 there can be no hesitation in referring them to that genus. M. 

 Cuvier has seen similar ones, from the same place, in the col- 

 lection of the Grand Duke of Tuscany. 



Lastly, there was a skeleton nearly entire, and many debris 

 of ichthyosaurus found at Boll, in Wirtemberg, the same place 

 where crocodiles and other fossils belonging to the secondary 



