154. THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 
scale than those with which the system began. There have 
been scales of the Holoptychius found in Clashbennie which 
measure three inches in length by two and a half in breadth, 
and a full eighth part of an inch in thickness. There occur 
occipital plates of fishes in the same formation in Moray, a 
full foot in length by half a foot in breadth. The fragment 
of a tooth still attached to a piece of the jaw, found in the 
sandstone cliffs that overhang the Findhorn, measures an inch 
in diameter at the base. A second tooth of the same forma- 
tion, of a still larger size, disinterred by Mr. Patrick Duff 
from out the conglomerates of the Scat-Craig, near Elgin, 
and now in his possession, measures two inches in length by 
rather more than an inch in diameter. (See Plate XIIL, fig. 4.) 
There occasionally turn up in the sandstones of Perthshire 
ichthyodorulites that in bulk and appearance resemble the 
teeth of a harrow rounded at the edges by a few months’ wear, 
and which must have been attached to fins not inferior in 
general bulk to the dorsal fin of an ordinary-sized porpoise. 
In short, the remains of a Patagonian burying-ground would 
scarcely contrast more strongly with the remains of that bat- 
tle-field described by Addison, in which the pygmies were an- 
nihilated by the cranes, than the organisms of the upper 
formation of the Old Red Sandstone contrast with those of 
the lower.* 
Of this upper formation the most characteristic and most 
abundant ichthyolite, as has been already said, is the Holop- 
* I have permitted this paragraph to remain as originally written, 
though the comparatively recent discovery of a gigantic Holoptychius (?) 
in the Lower Old Red Sandstone of Thurso, by Mr. Robert Dick of 
that place, (see introductory note,) bears shrewdly against its general 
line of statement. But it will at least, serve to show how large an 
