124 REVIEWS. 



from the pen of one who has been educated in a school, and under school- 

 masters from whom we rarely meet with a pupil. We cannot, however, 

 pass by one extract on the " Red Sandstone of Cromarty:" — 



"A rich ichthyolitic deposit of the Old Red Sandstone lies, as I have already said, 

 within less than half a mile of the town of Cromarty, and, when fatigued by my 

 calculations on the bank, I used to find delightful relaxation to lay open its fish 

 by scores, and to study their peculiarities as exhibited in their various states of 

 keeping, until, at length, I became able to determine their several genera and species 

 from even the minutest fragments. The number of ichthyolites which that deposit 

 of itself furnished — a patch little more than forty yards square — seemed altogether 

 astonishing. It supplied me with specimens, at almost every visit, for ten years 

 together. Nor, though after I left Cromarty for Edinburgh it was often explored by 

 geologic tourists, and by a few cultivators of science in the place, was it wholly 

 exhausted for ten years more. The ganoids of the second age of vertibrate exist- 

 ence must have congregated as thickly in that spot, in the times of the Lower Old 

 Red Sandstone, as herrings do now, in their season, on the best fishing banks of 

 Caithness or the Moray Firth. I was for some time greatly puzzled to restore these 

 ancient fishes, by the peculiarities of their organization. It was in vain I examined 

 every species of fish caught by the fishermen of the place, from the dogfish and the 

 skate to the herring and the mackarel. I could find in our recent fishes no such 

 scales of enamelled bone as those which covered the Dipterians and the Celacanths, 

 and no such plate- encased animals as the Coccosteus or Pterichthys. On the other 

 hand, with the exception of a double line of vertebral processes in the Coccosteus, 

 I could find in the ancient fishes no internal skeleton : they had apparently worn 

 all their bones outside, where the Crustaceans wear their shells, and were furnished 

 inside with but frameworks of perishable cartilage. It seemed somewhat strange, 

 too, that the geologists who occasionally came my way — some of them men of 

 eminence — seemed to know even less about my Old Red fishes and their peculia- 

 rities of structure than I did myself. I had represented the various species of 

 deposit simply by numerals, which not a few of the specimens of my collection still 

 retain on their faded labels ; and waited until some one should come the way, 

 learned enough, to substitute for my provisional figures words by which to designate 

 them ; but the necessary learning seemed wanting, and I, at length, came to find 

 that I had got into a terra incognita in the geological field, the greater portion of 

 whose organizms were unconnected with human language. They had no represen- 

 tatives among the vocables. 



" I formed my first imperfect acquaintance with the recent ganoidal fishes, in 

 1836, from a perusal of the late Dr. Hibbert's paper on the deposit of Burdiehouse, 

 which I owed to the kindness of Mr. George Anderson. Dr. Hibbert, in illustra- 

 ting the fishes of the Coal Measures, figured and briefly described the Lepidosteus 

 of the American rivers as a still surviving fish of the early type ; but his description 

 of the animal, though supplemented shortly after by that of Dr. Buckland, in his 

 Bridgewater Treatise, carried me but a little way. I saw that two of the Old Red 

 genera — Osteolepis and Diplopterus — resembled the American fish externally. It will 

 be seen that the first-mentioned of these ancient ichthyolites bears a name com- 

 pounded, though, in the reverse order, of exactly the same words. But while I 

 found the skeleton of the Lepidosteus described as remarkably hard and solid, I 

 could detect in the Osteolopis and its kindred genus no trace of internal skeleton 

 at all. The Cephalaspian genera, too — Coccosteus and Pterichthys — greatly puz- 

 zled me ; I could find no living analogues for them ; and so, in my often repeated 

 attempts at restoration, I had to build them up, plate by plate, as a child sets up 

 its dissected map or picture, bit by bit — every new specimen that turned up fur- 

 nishing a key for some part previously unknown — till at length, after many an 

 abortive effort, the creatures rose up before me in their strange, unwonted propor- 

 tions, as they had lived, untold ages before, in the primeval seas. The extraor- 

 dinary form of Pterichthys filled me with astonishment; and, with its arched 

 carpace and flat plastron restored before me, I leaped to the conclusion, that as the 

 recent Lepidosteus, with its ancient representatives of the Old Red Sandstone, were 



