120 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 
tion was by no means complete. The paddle-like arms were 
placed further below the shoulders than in any actual spe- 
cies; and | had transferred, by mistake, to the creature’s 
upper side, some of the plates of the Coccosteus. Still the 
type was unequivocally that of the Pterichthys. The secre- 
tary of the Society, Mr. Patrick Duff, an excellent geologist, 
to whose labors, in an upper formation of the Old Red Sand- 
stone, I shall have afterwards occasion to refer, questioned, 
as he well might, some of the details of the figure, and we 
corresponded for several weeks regarding it, somewhat in the 
style of Jonathan Oldbuck and his antiquarian friend, who 
succeeded in settling the meaning of two whole words, in an 
antique inscription, in little more than two years. Most of 
the other members looked upon the entire drawing, so strange 
did the appearance seem, as embodying a fiction of the same 
class with those embodied in the pictured griffins and uni- 
corns of mythologic Zoology; and, in amusing themselves 
with it, they bestowed on its betailed and bepaddled figure, as 
if in anticipation of Agassiz, the name of the draughtsman. 
Not many months after, however, a bona fide Pterichthys 
turned up in one of the newly discovered beds of Nairnshire, 
and the Association ceased to joke, and began to wonder. I 
merely mention the circumstance in connection with a right 
challenged, at the late meeting of the British Association at 
Glasgow, by a gentleman of Elgin, to be regarded as the 
original discoverer of the Pterichthys. I am, of course, far 
from supposing that the discovery was not actually made, but 
regret that it should have been kept so close a secret at a 
time when it might have stood the other discoverer of the 
creature in such stead. 
The exact place of the ichthyolites in the system was still 
to fix. I was spending a day, early in the winter of 1839, 
