56 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 
The description concludes, like a terrific dream, with his wan- 
derings through the labyrinths of the dead forest, where all 
was dry and sapless above, and mud and marsh below, and 
with his exclamations of grief and terror at finding himself 
hopelessly lost in a scene of prodigies and evil spirits. And 
such was one of the wilder fancies in which a youthful Scot- 
tish poet of the days of Flodden indulged, ere taste had arisen 
‘to restrain and regulate invention. 
Shall I venture to say, that the ichthyolites of the Old Red 
Sandstone have sometimes reminded me of the “ fisch of the 
laithlie flood?’ They were hardly less curious. We find 
them surrounded, like these, by a wilderness of dead vegeta- 
tion, and of rocks upcast from the sea; and there are the 
footprints of storm and tempest around and under them. 
True, they must have been less noisy. Like the “ griesly 
fisch,” however, they exhibit a strange union of opposite 
natures. One of their families — that of the Cephalaspis — 
seems almost to constitute a connecting link, says Agassiz, 
between fishes and crustaceans. They had, also, their fami- 
lies of sauroid, or reptile fishes — and their still more numer- 
ous families that unite the cartilaginous fishes to the osseous. 
And to these last the explorer of the Lower Old Red Sand- 
stone finds himself mainly restricted. The links of the 
system are all connecting links, separated by untold ages 
from that which they connect; so that, in searching for their 
representatives amid the existences of the present time, we 
find but the gaps which they should have occupied. And it 
is essentially necessary from this circumstance, in acquaint- 
ing one’s self with their peculiarities, to examine, if I may so 
express myself, the sides of these gaps, — the existing links 
at both ends to which the broken links should have pieced, 
— in short, all those more striking peculiarities of the exist- 
