Page:Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man.djvu/215

Rh an expert anatomist remarked to me that it would far exceed the skill, whether of the peasant who owned the vineyard or of the dealer above mentioned, to put together in their true position all the thirty-eight bones of the hand and fingers, or the sixteen of the wrist, without making any mistake, and especially without mixing those of the right with the homologous bones of the left hand, assuming that they had brought bones, from some other spot, and then artificially introduced them into a mixture of volcanic tuff and plaster of Paris.

Granting, however, that the high prices given for 'human fossils' at Le Puy may have led to the perpetration of some frauds, it is still an interesting question to consider whether the admission of the genuineness of a single fossil, such as that now in the museum at Le Puy, would lead us to assign a higher antiquity to the existence of man in France than is deducible from many other facts explained in the last seven chapters. In reference to this point, I may observe, that although I was not able to fix with precision the exact bed in the volcanic mountain from which the rock containing the human bones was taken, M. Felix Robert has, nevertheless, after studying 'the volcanic alluviums' of Denise, ascertained that, on the side of Cheyrac and the village of Malouteyre, blocks of tuff frequently occur exactly like the one in the museum. That tuff he considers a product of the latest eruption of the volcano. In it have been found the remains of Hyæna spelæa and Hippopotamus major. The eruptions of steam and gaseous matter which burst forth from the crater of Denise broke through laminated tertiary clays, small pieces of which, some of them scarcely altered, others half converted into scoriæ, were cast out in abundance, while other portions must have been in a state of argillaceous mud. Showers of such materials would be styled by the Neapolitans 'aqueous lava' or 'lava d'aqua,'