GEOLOGY. 611 



zodiac was discovered was built during the Roman rule, 

 as is proved by an inspection of the hieroglyphics, and 

 even by an inscription consecrating this sanctuary to the 

 welfare of the emjoeror Tiberius. 



Notwithstanding all these reasons, which are only 

 applicable to a civilized state, the opinion of G. Cuvier 

 has been assailed by the recent conquests of science. 



In past times some theological naturalists used every 

 effort to find some vestiges of fossil men contempo- 

 raries of the deluge. One of them thought he had suc- 

 ceeded, and gave the pompous name of homo dihirii testis 

 to the fragments of a skeleton discovered in Switzerland 

 by Scheuchzer in the quarries of OEningen. But Cuvier 

 scattered all this to the winds by showing that this precious 

 "man, a witness of the deluge," valued at its weight in 

 gold, and venerated as a holy relic, was nothing more 

 than the skeleton of a gigantic salamander. Doubt 

 was no longer possible. The head of the reptile had been 

 taken for the hip-bone; the teeth could be seen, and the 

 French naturalist had only to scrape the stone a little in 

 order to lay bare the claws. ^ 



At present this biblical ardour seems replaced by quite 

 an opposite tendency of argument. Scientific facts, the 

 value of which cannot be contested, clearly establish the 



' Scheuchzer, a naturalist and theologist, described his fossil man in his Physica 

 Sacra. He there represents it as one of the rarest relics of the accursed race 

 swallowed up by the deluge, and in his religious enthusiasm exclaims on looking 

 at it: — 



D'nn vieux damno deplorable charpente, 

 Qu'a ton aspect le pecheur se repente. 



In this fragment of a skeleton the learned Swiss thought he had found vestiges 

 of the frontal bone, remains of the skull, and a tolerably large fragment of the 

 maxillary bone and root of the nose. The authority of Cuvier and Camper 

 totally overturned this structure. — Cuvier, Ossemenis Fossiles. 



