THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 135 
to be the detached plates of some such crustacean as the lob- 
ster of Balruddery. (See Note H 2.) 
The ability displayed by Cuvier in restoring, from a few 
broken fragments of bone, the skeleton of the entire animal 
to which the fragments had belonged, astonished the world 
He had learned to interpret signs as incomprehensible to 
every one else as the mysterious handwriting on the wall had 
been to the courtiers of Belshazzar. The condyle of a jaw 
became in his hands a key to the character of the original 
possessor ; and in a few mouldering vertebre, or in the dilap- 
idated bones of a fore-arm or a foot, he could read a curious 
history of habits and instincts. In common with several gen- 
tlemen of Edinburgh, all men known to science, I was as 
much struck with the skill displayed by Agassiz in piecing 
together the fragments of the huge crustacean of Balruddery, 
and in demonstrating its nature as such. The numerous 
specimens of Mr. Webster were opened out before us. On 
a previous morning I had examined them, as I have said, in 
the company of Mr. Murchison and Dr. Buckland; they had 
been seen also by Lord Greenock, Dr. Traill, and Mr. Charles 
M’Laren; and their fragments of new and undescribed fishes 
had been at once recognized with reference to at least their 
class. But the collection contained organisms of a different 
kind, which seemed inexplicable to all—forms of various 
design, but so regularly mathematical in their outlines that 
they might be all described by a ruler and a pair of com- 
passes, and yet the whole were covered by seeming scales. 
There were the fragments of scaly rhombs, of scaly cres- 
cents, of scaly circles, with scaly parallelograms attached to 
them, and of several other regular compound figures besides. 
Mr. Murchison, familiar with the older fossils, remarked the 
close resemblance of the seeming scales to those of the Ser- 
