299 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 
ed, curved; he tail in many instances is bent round to the 
head; the spines stick out; the fins are spread to the full, as 
in fish that die in convulsions. The Pterichthys shows its 
arms extended at their stiffest angle, as if prepared for an 
enemy. ‘The attitudes of all the ichthyolites on this platform 
are attitudes of fear, anger, and pain. The remains, too, 
appear to have suffered nothing from the after attacks of pre- 
daceous fishes; none such seem to have survived. The rec- 
ord is one of destruction at once widely spread and total, so 
far as it extended. There are proofs that, whatever may 
have been the cause of the catastrophe, it must have taken 
place in a sea unusually still. The scales, when scattered by 
some slight undulation, are scattered to the distance of only a 
few inches, and still exhibit their enamel entire, and their 
peculiar fineness of edge. ‘The spines, even when separated, 
retain their original needle-like sharpness of point. Rays, 
well nigh as slender as horse-hairs, are enclosed unbroken in 
the mass. Whole ichthyolites occur, in which not only all 
the parts survive, but even the expression which the stiff and 
threatening attitude conveyed when the last struggle was 
over. Destruction must have come in the calm, and it must 
have been of a kind by which the calm was nothing dis- 
turbed. In what could it have originated? By what quiet 
but potent agency of destruction were the innumerable exist- 
ences of an area perhaps ten thousand square miles in extent 
annihilated at once, and yet the medium in which they had 
lived left undisturbed by its operations? Conjecture lacks 
footing in grappling with the enigma, and expatiates in un- 
certainty over all the known phenomena of death. Diseases 
of mysterious origin break out at times in the animal king- 
dom, and well nigh exterminate the tribes on which they fall. 
The present generation has seen a hundred millions of the 
