REVIEWS. 125 



sauroid fishes — strange connecting links between fishes and alligators*— so the 

 Pterichthys was a Chelonian fish — a connecting link between the fish and the 

 tortoise. A gurnard — insinuated so far through the shell of a small tortoise as to 

 suffer its head to protrude from the anterior opening, furnished with oar-hke pad- 

 dles instead of pectoral fins, and with its caudal fin clipped to a point — would, I 

 found, form no inadequate representative of this strangest of fishes. And when, 

 some years after, I had the pleasure of introducing it to the notice of Agassiz, I 

 found that, with all his world-wide experience of its class, it was as much an object 

 of wonder to him as it had been to myself. ' It is impossible,' we find him saying, 

 in his great work, ' to see aught more bizarre in all creation than the Pterichthyan 

 genus : the same astonishment that Cuvier felt in examining the Plesiosaurus, I 

 myself experienced when Mr. H. Miller, the first discoverer of these fossils, showed 

 me the specimens which he had detected in the Old Red Sandstone of Cromarty.' 

 And there were peculiarities about the Coccosteus that scarce less excited my 

 wonder than the general form of the Pterichthys, and which, when I first ventured 

 to describe them, were regarded by the higher authorities in Palaeontology as mere 

 blunders on the part of the observer. I have, however, since succeeded in demon- 

 strating that, if blunders at all — which I greatly doubt, for Nature makes very few 

 — it was Nature herself that was in error, not the observer. In this strange 

 Coccostean genus, Nature did place a group of opposing teeth in each ramus of the 

 lower jaw, just in the line of the symphysis — an arrangement unique, so far as is 

 yet known, in the vertebrate division of creation, and which must have rendered 

 the mouth of these creatures an extraordinary combination of the horizontal mouth 

 proper to the vertebrata, and of the vertical mouth proper to the crustaceans. It 

 was favourable to the integrity of my work of restoration, that the press was not 

 waiting for me, and that when portions of the creatures on which I wrought 

 were wanting, or plates turned up whose places I was unable to determine, I 

 could lay aside my self-imposed task for the time, and only resume it when some 

 new-found specimen supplied me with the materials requisite for carrying it on. 

 And so the restorations which I completed in 1840, and published in 1841, were 

 found, by our highest authorities in 1848, after they had been set aside for nearly 

 six years, to be essentially the true ones after all. I see, however v that one of the 

 most fanciful and monstrous of all the interim restorations of Pterichthys given to 

 the world — that made by Mr. Joseph Dinkel, in 1844, for the late Dr. Mantell, and 

 published in the ' Medals of Creation,' has been reproduced in the recent illustrated 

 edition of the ' Vestiges of Creation.' But the ingenious author of that work would 

 scarce act prudently were he to stake the soundness of his hypothesis on the inte- 

 grity of the restoration. For my own part, I consent, if it can be shown that the 

 Pterichthys, which once lived and moved on this ancient globe of ours, ever either 

 rose or sank into the Sterichthys of Mr. Dinkel, freely and fully to confess, not only 

 the possibility, but also the actuality, of the transmutation of both species and 

 genera. I am first, however, prepared to demonstrate, before any competent jury 

 of Palaeontologists in the world, that not a single plate or scale of Mr. Dinkel s 

 restoration represents those of the fish which he professed to restore ; that the same 

 judgment applies equally to his restoration of Coccosteus ; and that, instead of re- 

 producing in his figures the true forms of ancient Cephalaspians, he has merely 

 given, instead, the likeness of things that never were 'in the heavens above, or in 

 the earth beneath, or in the waters under the earth.' " 



We have endeavoured to give our readers some idea of this most 

 remarkable autobiography, in which is portrayed the working of a sensitive 

 and observing mind in its passage through the great school of life. It is a 

 book calculated at once to please and instruct all who are capable of 

 reflecting on the aim with which it is written — to rouse to the impor- 

 tant work of self-culture and self-government. Though there will be found 

 in it the ordinary faults of an autobiography, still the absence of false 

 sentiment and exaggeration must commend themselves even to the most 



