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 Hyaena spelaea 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 scoriae, 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," and we may well suppose that some human individuals, if any existed, would, together with wild animals, be occasionally overwhelmed in these tuffs. From near the place on the mountain whence the block with human bones now in the museum is said to have come, a stream of lava, well marked by its tabular structure, flowed down the flanks of the hill, within a few feet of the alluvial plain of the Borne, a small tributary of the Loire, on the opposite bank of which stands the town of Le Puy. Its continuous extension to so low a level clearly shows that the valley had already been deepened to within a few feet of its present depth at the time of the flowing of the lava. We know that the alluvium of the same district, having a similar relation to the present geographical outline of the valleys, is of Pleistocene date, for it contains around Le Puy the bones of Elephas primigenius and Rhinoceros tichorhinus; and this affords us a palaeontological test of the age of the human skeleton of Denise, if the latter be assumed to be coeval with the lava stream above referred to.