In the year 1859, Professor Hebert and M. Lartet visited Le Puy, expressly to investigate the same specimen, and to inquire into the authenticity of the bones and their geological age. Later in the same year, I went myself to Le Puy, having the same object in view, and had the good fortune to meet there my friend Mr. Poulett Scrope, with whom I examined the Montagne de Denise, where a peasant related to us how he had dug out the specimen with his own hands and in his own vineyard, not far from the summit of the volcano. I employed a labourer to make under his directions some fresh excavations, following up those which had been made a month earlier by MM. Hebert and Lartet, in the hope of verifying the true position of the fossils, but all of us without success. We failed even to find in situ any exact counterpart of the stone of the Le Puy Museum. The osseous remains of that specimen consist of a frontal and some other parts of the skull, including the upper jaw with teeth, both of an adult and young individual; also a radius, some lumbar vertebrae, and some metatarsal bones. They are all embedded in a light porous tuff, resembling in colour and mineral composition the ejectamenta of several of the latest eruptions of Denise. But none of the bones penetrate into another part of the same specimen, which consists of a more compact rock thickly laminated. Nevertheless, I agree with the Abbe Croizet and M. Aymard, that it is not conceivable even that the less coherent part of the museum Specimen which envelopes the human bones should have been artificially put together, whatever may have been the origin of certain other slabs of tuff which were afterwards sold as coming from the same place, and which also contained human remains. Whether some of these were spurious or not is a question more difficult to decide. One of them, now in the possession of M. Pichot-Dumazel, an advocate of Le Puy, is suspected of having had some plaster of Paris introduced into it to bind the bones more firmly together in the loose volcanic tuff. I was assured that a dealer in objects of natural history at Le Puy had been in the habit of occasionally securing the cohesion in that manner of fragments of broken bones, and the juxtaposition of uninjured ones found free and detachable in loose volcanic tuffs. From this to the fabrication of a factitious human fossil was, it is suggested, but a short step. But in reference to M. Pichot's specimen, 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