mity, when all his other relics proved of
no avail whatever?

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