110 
Mr. Konig on a fossil human Skeleton 
All the circumstances under which the known deposi- 
tions of bones occur, both in alluvial beds and in the caverns 
and fissures of Fletz limestone, tend to prove, that the animals 
to which they belonged met their fate in the very places 
where they now lie buried. Hence it may be considered as 
an axiom, that man, and other animals whose bones are not 
found intermixed with them, did not co-exist in time and place. 
The same mode of reasoning would further justify us in the 
conclusion that, if those catastrophes, which overwhelmed a 
great proportion of the brute creation, were general, as geo- 
gnostic observations in various parts of the world render pro- 
bable, the creation of man must have been posterior to that of 
those genera and species of mammalia, which perished by a 
general cataclysm, and whose bones are so thickly dissemi- 
nated in the more recent formations of rocks. 
The many instances of Anthropolithi described by authors, 
from Scheuchzer’s famous “ Homo diluvii testis et QzotncoTrogy’ 
to Spallanzani’s mountain of human bones in the island of 
Cerigo, have all proved not to be what they were taken for 
by the ignorant in osteology, and cannot, therefore, be ad- 
duced in objection to the above reasoning. Still less are the 
incrustations of human bones, (from the once celebrated ske- 
leton preserved in the Villa Lodovisi at Rome, to the skull 
found in the Tiber, and preserved in the British Museum,) cal- 
culated to subvert it; nor is the hypothesis likely to be greatly 
invalidated by the subject of this letter, with whose history, 
however, several circumstances are connected which appear 
to preclude the probability of a very recent deposition, or 
which, at least, require further elucidation, before its relative 
age can be pronouiiCed upon with any degree of confidence. 
