fragments of bone alleged to be human, are found, on examination, to belong to some animal, whether these fragments have been examined themselves, or merely through the medium of figures. Very recently, some were pretended to have been discovered at Marseilles, in a quarry that had been long neglected;[84] but they have turned out to be impressions of _tuyaux marines_.[85] Such real human bones as have been exhibited as fossil, belonged to bodies that had fallen into fissures, or had been left in the old galleries of mines, or that had been incrusted; and I extend this assertion even to the human skeletons discovered at Guadaloupe, in a rock formed of fragments of madrepore, thrown up by the sea, and united by water impregnated with calcareous matter.[86] The human bones found near Kœstriz, and pointed out by M. de Schlotheim, had been announced as taken out of very old beds; but this estimable naturalist is anxious to make known how much this assertion is still subject to doubt.[87] The same has been the case with the articles of human fabrication. The pieces of iron found at Montmartre are fragments of the tools which the workmen use for putting in blasts of gunpowder, and which sometimes break in the stone[88]. Yet human bones preserve equally well with those of animals, when placed in the same circumstances. In Egypt, no difference is remarked between the mummies of men and those of quadrupeds. I picked up, from the excavations made some years ago in the ancient church of St Genevieve, human bones that had been interred below the first race, which may even have belonged to some princes of the family of Clovis, and which still retained their forms very perfectly[89]. We do not find in ancient fields of battle that the skeletons of men are more wasted than those of horses, except in so far as they may have been influenced by size; and we find among fossil remains the bones of animals as small as rats, still perfectly preserved. Every circumstance, therefore, leads to the conclusion, that the human species did not exist in the countries in which the fossil bones have been discovered, at the epoch of the revolutions by which these bones were covered up; for there cannot be a single reason assigned, why men should have entirely escaped from such general catastrophes, or why their remains should not be now found like those of other animals. I do not presume, however, to conclude that man did not exist at all before this epoch. He might then have inhabited some narrow regions, whence he might have repeopled the earth after those terrible events. Perhaps also, the places which he inhabited may have been entirely swallowed up in the abyss, and his bones buried at the bottom of the present seas, with the exception of a small number of individuals, which have continued the species.