42 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 
We find the organisms of the Old Red Sandstone supply- 
ing an important link, or, rather, series of links, in the ichthy- 
ological scale, which are wanting in the present creation, and 
the absence of which evidently occasions a wide gap between 
the two grand divisions or series of fishes—the bony and 
the cartilaginous. Of this, however, more anon. Of all the 
organisms of the system, one of the most extraordinary, and 
the one in which Lamarck would have most delighted, is the 
Pterichthys, or winged fish, an ichthyolite which the writer 
had the pleasure of introducing to the acquaintance of geol- 
ogists nearly three years ago, but which he first laid open to 
the light about seven years earlier. Had Lamarck been the 
discoverer, he would unquestionably have held that he had 
caught a fish almost in the act of wishing itself into’a bird. 
There are wings which want only feathers, a body which 
seems to have been as well adapted for passing through the 
air as the water, and a tail by which to steer. And yet there 
are none of the fossils of the Old Red Sandstone which less 
resemble any thing that now exists than its Pterichthys. I 
fain wish I could communicate to the reader the feeling with 
which I contemplated my first-found specimen. It opened 
with a single blow of the hammer; and there, on a ground 
of light-colored limestone, lay the effigy of a creature fash- 
ioned apparently out of jet, with a body covered with plates, 
two powerful looking arms, articulated at the shoulders, a 
head as entirely lost in the trunk as that of the ray or the 
sun-fish, and a long, angular tail. My first-formed idea re- 
garding it was, that I had discovered a connecting link 
between the tortoise and the fish —the body much resembles 
that of a small turtle; and why, I asked, if one formation 
gives us sauroid fishes, may not another give us chelonian 
ones? or if in the Lias we find the body of the lizard 
