attest, yet it was evidently an adult from the comparison made of the size of the cranium as compared with that of others of the same species more aged, which were afterwards found in a fossil state in divers parts of Siberia. The entire length of the head from the upper part of the nape of the neck to the extremity of the denuded bone of the jaw was thirty inches; the horns were not with the head, but we could still see evident vestiges of two horns, the nasal and frontal. The front, unequal and a little protuberant between the orbits, and of a rhomboidal egg-shape, is deficient in the skin, and only covered by a light horny membrane, bristling with straight hairs as hard as horn.

" The skin which covers the greater part of the head is in the dried state, a tenacious, fibrous substance, like curried leather, of a brownish-black on the outside and white in the inside; when burnt, it had the odour of common leather; the mouth, in the place where the lips should have been soft and fleshy, was putrid and much lacerated \ the extremities of the maxillary bone were bare. Upon the left side, which had probably been longest exposed to the air, the skin was here and there decomposed and rubbed on the surface; nevertheless, the greater part of the mouth was so well preserved on the right side that the pores, or little holes from which doubtless the hairs had fallen, were still visible all over that side, and even in front. In the right side of the jaw there were still in certain places numerous hairs grouped in tufts, for the most part rubbed down to the roots, and here and there of two or three lines still retaining their full length. They stand erect, are stiff, and of an ashy [colour, but with one or two black, and a little stiffer than the others, in each bunch. " What was most astonishing, however, was the fact that the skin which covered the orbits of the eyes, and formed the eyelids, was so well preserved and so healthy that the openings of the eyelids could be seen, though deformed and scarcely penetrable to the finger; the skin which surrounded the orbits, though desiccated, formed circular furrows. The cavities of the eyes were filled with matter, either argillaceous or animal, such as still occupied a part of the cavity of the cranium. Under the skin the fibres and tendons still remained, and above all the remains of the temporal muscles; finally, in the throat hung some great bundles of muscular fibres. The denuded bones were young and less solid than in other fossil crania of the same species. The bone which gave support to the nasal horn was not yet attached to the vomer; it was unprovided with articulations like the processes of the young bones. The extremities of the jaws preserved no vestige either of teeth or sockets,

but they were covered here and there with the remains of the integument. The first molar was distant about four inches from the extreme edge of the jaw. "The foot which remains to me, and which, if I am not mistaken, belongs to the left hind limb, has not only preserved its skin quite intact and furnished with hairs, or their roots, as well as the tendons and ligaments of the heel in all their strength, but also the skin itself quite whole as far as the bend in the knee. The place of the muscles was filled with black mud. The extremity of the foot is cloven into three angles, the bony parts of which, with the periosteum, still remain here and there; the horny hoofs had been detached. The hairs adhering in many places to the skin were from one to

three lines in length, tolerably stifi" and ash- coloured. What remainsoi\. proves that the foot was covered with bunches of hair, which hung down. " We have never, so far as I know, observed so much hair on any rhinoceros which has been brought to Europe in our times, as appears to have been presented by the head and feet we have described. I leave you then to decide if our rhinoceros of the Lena was born or not in the temperate climate of Central Asia. In fact, the rhinoceros, as I gather from the relations of travellers, belongs to the forests of Northern India; and it is likely enough that these animals differ in a more hairy skin from those which live in the burning zones of Africa, just in the same way that other animals of a hotter climate are less wannly covered than those of the same genera in temperate

countries."'^ Of all fossil ruminants one of the largest and most singular is the Sivat/icriuni, whose remains have been found in the valley of Murkunda, in the Sewalik branch of the Sub-Himalayan Mountains. Its name is taken from that of Siva, the Indian deity worshipped in that part of India. The SivatJierium giganteum had a body as bulky as that of an ox, and bore a sort of resemblance to the living Elk. It combined in itself the characteristics of dilierent kinds of Herbivores, at the same time that it was marked by individual peculiarities. The massive head possessed four deciduous, hollow horns, like the Prongbuck; two front ones conical, smooth, and rapidly rising to a point, and two hinder ones of larger size, and branched, projected forward above the eyes, t Thus it differed from the deer, whose solid horns annually drop off, and

" Commentarii Academiae Petersburgicae,".3. t Dr. James Murie, Geological A lagazine^ vol. viii., p. 438.

THE WORLD BEFORE THE DELUGE.

366

from the antelope tribe, sheep and oxen, whose hollow horns are persistent, and resembled only one living ruminant, the prongbuck, in having had hollow horns subject to shedding. Fig. 176 is a representation of the Sivatheriiim restored, in so far, at least, as it is

Fig. 176.— Sivatherium restored.

possible to do so in the case of an animal of which only the cranium and a few other bones have been discovered.

As if to rival these gigantic Mammals, great numbers of Reptiles seem to have lived in the Pliocene period, although they are no longer of the same importance as in the Secondary epoch. Only one of these, however, need occupy our attention, it is the Salamander. The living Salamanders are amphibious Batrachians, with smooth skins, and rarely attaining the length of twenty inches. The

THE PLIOCENE PERIOD. 36/

Salamander of the Tertiary epoch had the dimensions of a Crocodile; and its discovery opens a pregnant page in the history of geology. The skeleton of this Reptile was long considered to be that of a human victim of the deluge, and was spoken of as *' homo diluvii testis y It required all the efforts of Camper and Cuvier to eradicate this error from the minds of the learned, and probably in the minds of the vulgar it survived them both.

Upon the left bank of the Rhine, not far from Constance, a little above Stein, and near the village of CEningen, in Switzerland, there are some fine quarries of schistose limestone. In consequence of their varied products these quarries have often been described by naturalists; they are of Tertiary age, and were visited, among others, by Horace de Saussure, by whom they are described in the third

volume of his " Voyage dans les Alpes.''

In 1725, a large block of stone was found, incnisted in which a skeleton was discovered, remarkably well preserved; and Scheuchzer, a Swiss naturalist of some celebrity, who added to his scientific pursuits the study of theology, was called upon to give his opinion as to the nature of this relic of ancient times. He thought he recognised in the skeleton that of a man. In 1726 he published a description of these fossil remains in the " Philosophical Transactions " of London; and in 173 1 he made it the subject of a special dissertation, entitled " Homo diluvii testis'' — Man, a witness of the Deluge. This dissertation was accompanied by an engraving of the skeleton. Scheuchzer returned to the subject in another of his works, "Physica Sacra," saying: "It is certain that this schist contains the half, or nearly so, of the skeleton of a man; that the substance even of the bones, and, what is more, of the flesh and of parts still softer than the flesh, are there incorporated in the stone; in a word, it is one of the rarest relics which we have of that accursed race which was buried under the waters. The figure shows us the contour of the frontal bone, the orbits with the openings which give passage to the great nerves of the fifth pair. We see there the remains of the brain, of the sphenoidal bone, of the roots of the nose, a notable fragment of the maxillary bone, and some vestiges of the liver."

And our pious author exclaims, this time taking the lyrical form —

"Betriibtes Beingeriist von einem altem Sunder Erweiche, Stein, das Herz der neuen Boslieitskinder! "

" O deplorable skeleton of an accursed ancient, Mayst thou soften the hearts of the late children of wickedness!"

The reader has before him the fossil of theXEningen schist (Fig.

Fig. 177.—Andrias Scheuchzeri,

177). It is obviously impossible

to see in this skeleton what the

enthusiastic savant wished to perceive. And we can form an idea

from this instance, of the errors

to which a preconceived idea,

blindly followed, may sometimes

lead. How a ‘naturalist of such

eminence as Scheuchzer could

have perceived in this enormous

head, and in these upper members, the least resemblance to

the osseous parts of a man is

incomprehensible !

The Pre-Adamite “witness of

the deluge” made a great noise

in Germany, and no one there

dared to dispute the opinion of

the Swiss naturalist, under his

double authority of theologian

and savant. This, probably, is the

reason why Gesner in his “ Traité

des Pétrifactions,” published in

1758, describes with admiration

the fossil of GEningen, which he

attributes, with Scheuchzer, to

the antediluvian man. 7

Pierre Camper alone dared

to oppose this opinion, which

was then universally professed

throughout Germany. He went

to CEningen in 1787 to examine

the celebrated fossil animal; he

had no difficulty in detecting

the error into which Scheuchzer

had fallen. He recognised at

once that it was a Reptile; but

he deceived himself, nevertheless, as to the family to which

it belonged; he took it for a

Saurian. “A petrified lizard,”

Camper wrote ; “could it possibly

pass for a man?" It was left to Cuvier to place in its true family the fossil of (Eningen; in a memoir on the subject he demonstrated that this skeleton belonged to one of the amphibious batrachians called Salamanders. " Take," he says in his memoir, " a skeleton of a Salamander and place it alongside the fossil, without allowing yourself to be misled by the difference of size, just as you could easily do in comparing a drawing of the salamander of the natural size with one of the fossil reduced to a sixteenth part of its dimensions, and everything will be explained in the clearest manner." " I am even persuaded," adds the great naturalist, in a subsequent edition of this memoir, " that, if we could re-arrange the fossil and look closer into the details, we should find still more numerous proofs in the articular faces of the vertebrae, in those of the jaws, in

the vestiges of very small teeth, and even in the labyrinth of the ear." And he invited the proprietors or depositaries of the precious fossil to proceed to such an examination. Cuvier had the gratification of making, personally, the investigation he suggested. Finding himself at Haarlem, he asked permission of the Director of the Museum to examine the, stone which contained the supposed fossil man. The operation was carried on in the presence of the director and another naturalist. A drawing of the skeleton of a Salamander was placed near the fossil by Cuvier, who had the satisfaction of recognising, as the stone was chipped away under the chisel, each of the bones, announced by the drawing, as they made their appearance. In the natural sciences there are few instances of such triumphant results — few demonstrations so satisfactory as this, of the certitude of the methods of observation and induction on which palaeontology is based.

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