Thomas Campbell, when asked for a toast in a society of authors, gave the memory of Napoleon Bonaparte; significantly adding, "he once hung a bookseller." On a nearly similar principle I would be disposed to propose among geologists a grateful bumper in honor of the revolutionary army that besieged Maestricht. That city, some seventy-five or eighty years ago, had its zealous naturalist in the person of M. Hoffmann, a diligent excavator in the quarries of St. Peter's mountain, long celebrated for its extraordinary fossils. Geology, as a science, had no existence at the time; but Hoffmann was doing, in a quiet way, all he could to give it a beginning;--he was transferring from the rock to his cabinet, shells, and corals, and crustacea, and the teeth and scales of fishes, with now and then the vertebrae, and now and then the limb-bone, of a reptile. And as he honestly remunerated all the workmen he employed, and did no manner of harm to any one, no one heeded him. On one eventful morning, however, his friends the quarriers laid bare a most extraordinary fossil,--the occipital plates of an enormous saurian, with jaws four and a half feet long, bristling over with teeth, like _chevaux de frise_; and after Hoffmann, who got the block in which it lay embedded, cut out entire, and transferred to his house, had spent week after week in painfully relieving it from the mass, all Maestricht began to speak of it as something really wonderful. There is a cathedral on St. Peter's mountain,--the mountain itself is church-land; and the lazy canon, awakened by the general talk, laid claim to poor Hoffmann's wonderful fossil as _his_ property. He was lord of the manor, he said, and the mountain and all that it contained belonged to him. Hoffmann defended his fossil as he best could in an expensive lawsuit; but the judges found the law clean against him; the huge reptile head was declared to be "treasure trove" escheat to the lord of the manor; and Hoffmann, half broken-hearted, with but his labor and the lawyer's bills for his pains, saw it transferred by rude hands from its place in his museum, to the residence of the grasping churchman. The huge fossil head experienced the fate of Dr. Chalmer's two hundred churches. Hoffmann was a philosopher, however, and he continued to observe and collect as before; but he never found such another fossil; and at length, in the midst of his ingenious labors, the vital energies failed within him, and he broke down and died. The useless canon lived on. The French Revolution broke out; the republican army invested Maestricht; the batteries were opened; and shot and shell fell thick on the devoted city. But in one especial quarter there alighted neither shot nor shell. All was safe around the canon's house. Ordinary relics would have availed him nothing in the circumstances,--no, not "the three kings of Cologne," had he possessed the three kings entire, or the jaw-bones of