ICHTHYOSAURIA 109 



account for the remains of sea-animals in rocks remote from the 

 seas. This belief, so long held by even the wisest and most learned 

 of scholars, so long welcomed by the theologians as proof of ;the 

 literal accurracy of the Bible, was one of which Scheuchzer was 

 quite convinced. His Piscium Querulae was largely a fantastic 

 discussion of the supposed great world-catastrophie, the Noachian 

 Deluge, by which the fishes had been destroyed and long imprisoned 

 in the rocks through no sin of their own. 



It was the same author who, in a subsequent work, described and 

 figured the fossil skeleton of a large salamander which he believed 

 to be that of a child destroyed in the flood, and which he called 

 "Homo diluvii testis." In this specimen, which was discovered in 

 the Tertiary rocks of Oeningen, and which is still preserved among 

 the historically as well as scientifically famous fossils of the museum 

 at Haarlem under the name Andrias Scheuchzeri, Scheuchzer 

 thought that he detected, not only the skeleton of a child, but even 

 its brain, hver, muscles, etc.! His engraving of this "Witness of 

 the Flood," the "sorrowful skeleton of an old sinner drowned in 

 the Flood,''' as also that of the ichthyosaur vertebrae of Altorf, were 

 afterward printed in the famous "Copper Bible" as positive proof 

 of the literal accuracy of the biblical record. 



Earher than the pubhcation of these figures by Baier and 

 Scheuchzer, at the very close of the seventeenth century, a Welsh 

 naturalist by the name of Lluyd, in a large and beautifully illus- 

 trated work, figured — perhaps for the fijrst time — remains of 

 ichthyosaurs, which he believed to be those of fishes. But 

 Lluyd accounted for these and all other fossil remains by a 

 very different theory from that of Scheuchzer and the theologians 

 — a theory which at one time had many adherents among scholars. 

 He believed that the spawn of fishes or the eggs of other 

 creatures had been carried up from the seas and lands in moist 

 vapors into the clouds, whence they had descended in rain, 

 penetrating the earth to give origin to the fossils; in other 

 words, he believed that all fossils grew in the earth from germs 

 of the living animals that inhabited the land and seas. Certainly 

 the old philosophers were hard driven to make facts agree with 

 theories ! 



