200 Dr Hissert on the Limestone of Burdiehouse 
« The heart also has not the appearance of the heart of an 
ordinary fish. It is destitute of that inflation, so characteristic 
of fish, called Bulbus-aorticus, and has rather the aspect of the 
heart of a ree 
Such is the important information transmitted me by M. 
Agassiz relative to the Lepidosteus. 
That the animal should have been found to possess lungs is 
a circumstance which may be availed of in certain geological spe- 
culations, and upon which some few remarks will be made _here- 
after. In the mean time I may observe, that, if the presence of 
lungs in their very complicated structure deserve to be consider- 
ed as a reptilian character, which it is usually supposed to be, the 
Lepidosteus, instead of being regarded as a sauroid fish, rather 
deserves the appellation of a finny reptile. 
But without insisting upon the propriety of the latter term, 
which, on account of other points of anatomical difference, par- 
ticularly the form of the jaw, would be disputed, it may be, last- 
ly, remarked, that the teeth, the scales, and various large frag- 
ments of bones which have been discovered at. Burdiehouse, will 
be referred to an animal bearing the greatest affinity to the Lepi- 
dosteus, although far larger. 
NOTES TO SECTION IX. 
M. Acassiz, in his ** Recherches sur les Poissons Fossiles,” has. given a draw- 
ing of the Lepidosteus, of which the wood-cut of this Memoir is a reduction. But 
in the present incipient state of his work, a full description of the animal has not 
yet appeared. 
Soon after my Memoir had been read to the Royal Society of Edinburgh, in, 
which I had supposed that a saurian animal was indicated by the teeth and scales 
which had been discovered at Burdiehouse, I obtained a glance only at the first num- 
ber of M. Acassiz’s work, in which the Lepidosteus was figured ;— (for my own sub- 
soription copy had been slow in arriving.) I remember having been struck with the 
animal’s crocodilian appearance, which was the only impression I then felt, as I had 
not been able to subdue the conviction in my own mind, that the monster which pos- 
sessed teeth like those which were found at Burdiehouse, must have been as complete- 
ly a saurian reptile as the Gavial of the Ganges. 
7 
