At St. Pietersberg, a small mountain in the vicinity of Maestricht, Holland, there are immense subterranean stone quarries, which have been worked for more than a thousand years. The stone quarried from them is a sandy limestone of Upper Cretaceous age containing many well-preserved remains of extinct animals that have long been sought by collectors of fossils. In 1776 Major Drouin—an officer of a near-by garrison, one of much military importance in those days—secured from one of these quarries some bones of an extinct reptile, which, though of interest, afforded but little information concerning the structure and affinities of the animal to which they had once belonged. In 1780 a very perfect skull, in excellent preservation, of the same kind of an animal was obtained from the same quarry by Dr. Hofmann, an army surgeon of the same garrison, whose interest in such things had been incited by Major Drouin’s collections. This specimen, so renowned in science, has had a remarkable and eventful human history, in part related by St. Faujas de Fond, a French commissary of the “Army of the North,” and one of the participants: In one of the great galleries or subterranean quarries in which the Cretaceous stone of St. Pieter’s Mount is worked, about five hundred paces from the entrance, and ninety feet below the surface, the quarrymen exposed part of the skull of a large animal in a block of stone which they were engaged in quarrying. On discovering it they suspended their work and went to inform Dr. Hofmann, surgeon to the forces at Maestricht, who for some years had been collecting the fossils from the quarry, remunerating the workmen liberally for the discovery and preservation of them. Dr. Hofmann, arriving at the spot, saw with extreme pleasure the indication of a magnificent specimen; he directed the operations of the men, so that they worked out the block without injury to the fossil, and he then, by degrees, cleared away the yielding matrix and exposed the extraordinary jaws and teeth, which have since been the subject of so many drawings, descriptions, and discussions. This fine specimen which Dr. Hofmann had transported with so much satisfaction to his collection, soon became, however, a source of much chagrin to him. Dr. Goddin, one of the canons of Maestricht, who owned the surface of the soil beneath which was the quarry whence the fossil was obtained, when the fame of the fossil reached his ears, pleaded certain feudal rights in support of his claim to it. Hofmann resisted and the canon went to law. The whole chapter supported their reverend brother, and the decree ultimately went against the poor surgeon, who lost both the specimen and his money, for he was made to pay the costs of the action. The canon, leaving all remorse to the judges who pronounced the iniquitous sentence, became the happy