130 PALAEONTOLOGY 



constituent mud. From no other part of the world, perhaps, can 

 a large flagstone be got, which a builder could set on its edge 

 with assurance of its holding long together in that position. A 

 great proportion of the county of Caithness formed, before its 

 upheaval, the bottom of what may truly be termed a " piscina 

 mirabilis." Yet there are minds, who, cognizant of the won- 

 derful structures of the extinct Devonian fishes — of the evi- 

 dence of design and adaptation in their structures — of the 

 altered nature of the sediment surrounding them, and its 

 dependence on the admixture of the decomposing and dissolved 

 soft parts of the old fish — would deliberately reject the conclu- 

 sions which healthy human reason must, as its Creator has 

 constituted it, draw from such proofs of His operations. 

 There are now individuals, one at least,* who prefer to try to 

 make it be believed that God had recently, and at once, called 

 into being all these phenomena ; that the fossil bones, scales, 

 and teeth, had never served their purpose — had never been 

 recent — were never truly developed, but were created fossil ; 

 that the creatures they simulate never actually existed ; that 

 the superior hardness of the inclosing matrix was equally due 

 to primary creation, not to any secondary cause ; that the 

 geological evidences of superposition, successive stratification, 

 and upheaval were, equally with the palseontological evidences, 

 an elaborate design to deceive and not instruct ! 



Family V. — Palyeoniscid-e. 



The Placoganoids, so richly represented in the Devonian 

 epoch, disappear in the carboniferous one ; the Lepidoganoids 

 increase in number. In the present family they combine 

 with rhomboid scales, a heterocercal tail, and jaws armed with 

 numerous, minute, close-set, rather blunt teeth. The type- 

 genus is Palcconiscas (fig. 51), species of which range through- 

 out the carboniferous and Permiau beds : it is characterized by 



* See Omphalos, by P. H. Gosse, 8vo, 1858. 



