Part 52

I am confirmed in this opinion by the sketches transmitted to me by M. Cottard, one of the Professors of the College of Marseilles.

These skeletons, more or less mutilated, are found near Port de Moule, on the north-west coast of the mainland of Guadaloupe, in a kind of slope resting against the steep edges of the island. This slope is, in a great measure, covered by the sea at high-water, and is nothing else than a tufa, formed, and daily augmented, by the very small debris of shells and corals, which the waves detach from the rocks, and the accumulated mass of which assumes a great degree of cohesion in the places that are most frequently left dry. We find, on examining them with a lens, that several of these fragments have the same red tint as a part of the corals contained in the reefs of the island. Formations of this kind are common in the whole archipelago of the Antilles, where they are known to the Negroes under the name of Maçonne-bon-dieu. Their augmentation is proportioned to the violence of the surge. They have extended the plain of the Cayes to St Domingo, the situation of which has some resemblance to the Plage du Moule, and there are sometimes found in it fragments of earthen vessels, and of other articles of human fabrication, at a depth of twenty feet. A thousand conjectures have been made, and even events imagined, to account for these skeletons of Guadaloupe. But, from all the circumstances of the case, M. Moreau de Jonnès, correspondent of the Academy of Sciences, who has been upon the spot, and to whom I am indebted for the above details, thinks that they are merely bodies of persons that have perished by shipwreck. They were discovered in 1805 by M. Manuel Cortès y Campomanès, at that time a general officer in the service of the colony. General Ernouf, the governor, caused one to be extracted with much labour, of which the head, and almost the whole superior extremities, were wanting. This had been deposited at Guadaloupe, in the expectation that another and more complete specimen would be procured, in order to send them together to Paris, when the island was taken by the English. Admiral Cochrane having found this skeleton at the headquarters, sent it to the English Admiralty, who presented it to the British Museum. It is still in that collection, and M. Kœnig, Keeper of the Mineralogical Department, has described it in the Phil. Trans. of 1814, and there I saw it in 1818. M. Kœnig observes, that the stone in which it is imbedded, has not been cut to its present shape, but that it seems to have been simply inserted, in the form of a distinct nodule, into the surrounding mass. The skeleton is so superficial, that its presence must have been perceived by the projection of some of its bones. They still contain some of their animal matter, and the whole of their phosphate of lime. The rock being entirely formed of pieces of corals, and of compact limestone, readily dissolves in nitric acid. M. Kœnig has detected fragments of Millepora miniacea, of several madrepores, and of shells, which he compares to Helix acuta and Turbo pica. This fossil skeleton is represented in Plate I. More recently, General Donzelot has caused another of these skeletons to be extracted, which is now in the Royal Cabinet, and of which a figure is given in Plate II. It is a body which has the knees bent. A small portion of the upper jaw, the left half of the lower, nearly the whole of one side of the trunk and pelvis, and a large portion of the left upper and lower extremities, are what remain of it. The rock which contains it, is evidently a travertin, in which are imbedded shells of the neighbouring sea, and land-shells, which are still found alive in the island, namely, the Bulimus guadalupensis of Ferussac.

See M. de Schlotheim’s Treatise on Petrifactions, Gotha, 1820, p. 57; and his Letter in the Isis of 1820, 8th Number, No. 6. of Supplement.

It is perhaps proper that I take notice of those fragments of sandstone, regarding which some noise was attempted to be made last year (1824), and in which a man and a horse were alleged to have been found petrified. The mere circumstance of its being a man and a horse, with their flesh and skin, that these fragments must have represented, might have enabled every one to perceive that the whole was a mere lusus naturæ, and not a true petrifaction.--Note L.

Fourcroy has given an analysis of them in the Annales du Museum, vol. x. p. 1.

Journal de Physique, t. xlii, p. 40. et seq.

Herod. Euterpe, v. and xxv.

Arist. Meteor. lib. i. cap. 14.

Demaillet, Description of Egypt, p. 102-3.

Herod. Euterpe, xiii.

See M. Girard’s Observations on the valley of Egypt; and on the secular increase of the soil which covers it, in the great work upon Egypt, and Mod. Mem. t. ii. p. 343. On this subject we may further observe that Dolomieu, Shaw, and other respectable authors, have estimated these secular elevations much higher than M. Girard. It is to be lamented, that nowhere has it been tried to examine the depth of these deposits over the original soil, or the natural rock.

See M. Forfait’s Memoir on the lagunes of Venice, inserted in the Mém. de la Classe Phys. de l’Institut, t. v. p. 213.

Note M.

In various parts of the two last volumes of his Letters to the Queen of England.

Melpom. lxxxvi.

Ibid. lvi.

This supposed diminution of the Black Sea and Sea of Asoph, has also been attributed to the rupture of the Bosphorus, which had taken place at the pretended period of the deluge of Deucalion; and yet, in order to establish the fact itself, recourse is had to successive diminutions of the extent attributed to these seas by Herodotus, Strabo, and others. But it is very obvious, that, if this diminution had arisen from the rupture of the Bosphorus, it would necessarily have been completed long before the time of Herodotus, and even at the period at which Deucalion is supposed to have lived.

See the Geography of Herodotus by M. Rennel, p. 56. et seq.; and the Physical Geography of the Black Sea, &c. by M. Dureau de Lamalle. There is only at present the small river of Kamennoipost, that could represent the Gerrhus and Hypacyris, such as they are described by Herodotus.

M. Dureau, p. 170, supposes Herodotus to have made the Borysthenes and Hypanis discharge themselves into the Palus Mæotis; but Herodotus (in Melpom. liii.) only says that these two rivers fall together into the same lake, that is, into the Liman, as at the present day. Herodotus does not carry the Gerrhus and Hypacyris any farther.

For example, M. Dureau de Lamalle, in his Physical Geography of the Black Sea, quotes Aristotle (Meteor. lib. i. cap. 13.) as “apprising us, that, in his time, there still existed several ancient periods and peripli, attesting that there had been a canal leading from the Caspian Sea into the Palus Mæotis.” Now, Aristotle’s words at the place mentioned (Duval’s edition, i. 545. B.) are merely these: “From the Paropamisus, descend, among other rivers, the Bactrus, the Choaspes, and the Araxis, from which the Tanais, which is a branch of it, takes its origin, into the Palus Mæotis.” Who does not see that this nonsense, which is neither founded upon peripli nor periods, is nothing else than the strange idea of Alexander’s soldiers, who took the Jaxartes or Tanais of the Transoxian for the Don or Tanais of Scythia? Arrian and Pliny distinguish these two rivers from each other, but the distinction does not appear to have been made in the time of Aristotle. How, then, could such geographers as these furnish us with geological documents?

See the Report upon the Downs of the Gulf of Gascony (or Bay of Biscay) by M. Tassin.--Mont. de-Marsan, an x.

Memoir on the means of fixing Downs, by M. Bremontier.

Report of M. Tassin, loc. cit.

See M. Bremontier’s Memoir.

Denon, Voyage en Egypte.

We might cite in confirmation all the travellers who have visited the western border of Egypt.

These phenomena are very well treated of in M. Deluc’s Letters to the Queen of England, in the parts where he describes the peat-mosses of Westphalia; and in his Letters to Lametherie, inserted in the Journal de Physique for 1791, &c. as well as in those which he has addressed to Blumenbach. We may refer also to the very interesting details which are given in note F, respecting the islands of the west coast of the Duchy of Sleswick, and the manner in which they have been joined, whether to one another, or to the continent, by alluvial depositions and peat-mosses, as well as respecting the irruptions of the sea which from time to time have destroyed or separated some of their parts.

The period of Cyrus, about 650 years before the Christian era.