Scheuchzer, while walking one day with his friend Langhans in the vicinity of Altorf, a village and university of Nuremburg, went to the vicinity of the gallows to make some researches. Langhans, who had entered the inclosure of the gallows, found a piece of limestone containing eight dorsal vertebrae, of a black color and shining. Seized, says Scheuchzer, with a panic terror, Langhans threw the fragment of limestone beyond the wall of the inclosure, and Scheuchzer, picking it up, preserved two of the vertebrae which he believed to be human, and which he figured in his book, _Piscium Querulae_. About the same time another observer by the name of Baier discovered other and similar vertebrae in the vicinity of Altorf which he described and figured as those of a fish; and there was much earnest contention between Scheuchzer and Baier, as also between their friends, as to their supposed nature. Scheuchzer’s figure was often cited as indubitable evidence of the destruction of mankind by a universal flood, and it was not until nearly a century later that Cuvier showed that the bones were really those of a marine reptile. [Illustration: FIG. 51.—Restoration of _Ichthyosaurus_ with young, by Charles R. Knight. (By permission of the American Museum of Natural History.)] It must be recollected, in extenuation of so extraordinary a blunder on the part of so learned a man as was Scheuchzer, who, as a physician and professor, one would think ought to have been able to distinguish between vertebrae so different as are those of an ichthyosaur and a man, that, during all of the eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth, the belief was prevalent that all fossils were the relics of animals and plants that had perished in the great biblical flood. The science of geology was yet in its infancy, and there was no known record, other than the biblical one, of any great inundation of the earth’s surface which might account for the remains of sea-animals in rocks remote from the seas. This belief, so long held by even the wisest and most learned of scholars, so long welcomed by the theologians as proof of the literal accuracy of the Bible, was one of which Scheuchzer was quite convinced. His _Piscium Querulae_ was largely a fantastic discussion of the supposed great world-catastrophe, the Noachian Deluge, by which the fishes had been destroyed and long imprisoned in the rocks through no sin of their own.