An Adelaide Find.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume XLVI, Issue 203, 31 August 1904, Page 4

An Adelaide Find.

DOrIITFUL "WOIUC OF ART.

A combination of ingenuity ami innocence failed uniyappily to curry off the scientific sensation prepared for Adelaide people (said the Ausirnlusian recently). The fossil figure of an aboriginal girl, said to have been excavated (out of a perfectly porous soil) in a vineyard at Beaumont, proved to be of too recent manufacture and interment to luave any more antiquarian interest than the mummy exhibited by Professor Quackcnboss or the cuneiform inscription unearthed by Mr l'ickwick, '• llil Stumps, his mark." But it funiiSned an agreeable excitement for a day or two. Adelaide scientists took trips to the scene of the discovery, also inspected the figure as it lay in state in a city "lolly" shop, while the detective instincts of the press were keenly aroused. Indirectly the "fossil" seems to be confiected with the honour South Australia lately paid to the explorer, John, McDouull Stuart. A couple of Italian marble workers, near Sulu, were employed to rough-ihew the Stuart statue (or the sculptor, and may have been stimulated by their task into what De Quincey calls "a rapture of creative art." At any rate they purchased in Adelaide, last June, a block of New South Wales marble, of dimensions tallying with those of the figure miraculously preserved in travertine limestone. They also .borrowed tools from a retired monumental mason, representing incorrectly, that they wanted to make busts for a wclli known architect. These tools, it

seems, were taken delivery of by a woman who signed as Mrs Salotti, the wife of the owner of the Beaumont vineyard. It is not supposed, however, that this lady, if, indeed, she were the intermediary, associates her errand with the antiquarian discovery, because she is evidently convinced of its importance. This is proved by the account of the Register reporter when he viewed the relic in Mrs Salotti'3 presence : "Beautiful, toenails it's got," she remarked. "And wtant a lovely chest. I wish I had one like It. It must be thousands of years old." The pressman insincerely ventured a remark to the effect that it must be uncanny to have a "mummy" about the house. "Yes," replied Mrs Salo4ti, "it haa interrupted my sleep a lot. It must bo thousands of years old." Tho reporter went on to say that one felt like taking a whisky

and soda as a pick-me-up after looking at the impressive " Beaumont Belle." Sirs Salotti quite agreed with him. "Or even something] stronger," she said. ''You know it must be thousands of years old. Our servant girl used to hang her clothes in this room. Wo did not tell her about the ligure, and she went in and saw it. She fainted, and we had to give -her a cup of brandy and water, it must be thousands of years old." The market quotation for the Beaumont figure seems to have declined rapidly from £l5O to 2Us, solely on the supposition that it is a genuine work of art. v