The second chapter, "The Tale of Inspector Legrasse", discusses the first time the Professor had heard the word "Cthulhu" and seen a similar image. At the 1908 meeting of the American Archaeological Society in St. Louis, Missouri, a New Orleans police official named John Raymond Legrasse asked the assembled antiquarians to identify an idol carved from a mysterious greenish-black stone. Legrasse had discovered the relic months before in the swamps south of New Orleans, during his raid on a supposed voodoo cult. The idol resembles Wilcox's sculpture, and represented a "thing, which seemed instinct with a fearsome and unnatural malignancy, was of a somewhat bloated corpulence, and squatted evilly on a rectangular block or pedestal covered with undecipherable characters.”