136 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 
aphim of Forfarshire, but deferred the whole to the judgment 
of Agassiz; no one else hazarded a conjecture. Agassiz 
glanced over the collection. One specimen especially caught 
his attention — an elegantly symmetrical one. It seemed a 
combination of the parallelogram and the crescent: there 
were pointed horns at each end ; but the convex and concave 
lines of the opposite sides passed into almost parallel right 
lines towards the centre. His eye brightened as he contem- 
plated it. ‘IT will tell you,” he said, turning to the company 
—‘“T will tell you what these are—the remains of a huge 
lobster.” He arranged the specimens in the group before 
him with as much apparent ease as I have seen a young girl 
arranging the pieces of ivory or mother-of-pearl in an Indian 
puzzle. A few broken pieces completed the lozenge-shaped 
shield; two detached specimens, placed on its opposite sides, 
furnished the claws; two or three semi-rings, with serrated 
edges, composed the jointed body; the compound figure, 
which but a minute before had so strongly attracted his atten- 
tion, furnished the terminal flap ; and there lay the huge lob- 
ster before us, palpable to all. There is homage due to 
supereminent genius, which nature spontaneously pays when 
there are no low feelings of envy or jealousy to interfere 
with her operations ; and the reader may well believe that it 
was willingly rendered on this occasion to the genius of 
Agassiz. 
The terminal flap of this gigantic crustacean was, as I 
have said, continuous. The creature, however, seems to 
have had contemporaries of the same family, whose construc- 
tion in the divisions of the flap resembled more the lobsters 
of the present day ; and the reader may see in the subjoined 
print the representation of a very characteristic fragment of 
an animal of this commoner type, from the Middle Sandstones 
