224 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 
extensive, could well account for some of the phenomena 
of this platform of death. It is rarely that disease falls 
equally on many different tribes at once, and never does it 
fall with instantaneous suddenness; whereas in the ruin of 
this platform from ten to twelve distinct genera seem to have 
been equally involved; and so suddenly did it perform its 
work, that its victims were fixed in their first attitude of ter- 
ror and surprise. I have observed, too, that groups of ad- 
joining nodules are charged frequently with fragments of the 
dead; whereas the bodies of fish whose bowels and air-bladders are 
comparatively small and tender, lie at the bottom. The herring fish- 
erman, if the fish die in his nets, finds it no easy matter to buoy them 
up; and if the shoal entangled be a large one, he fails at times, from 
the great weight, in recovering them at all, losing both nets and her- 
rings. Now, if a corresponding difference obtained among fish of the 
extinct period—if some rose to the surface when they died, while 
others remained at the bottom — we must, of course, expect to find 
their remains in very different degrees of preservation — to find only 
scattered fragments of the floaters, while of the others many may oc- 
cur comparatively entire. Even should they have died on the same 
beds, too, we may discover their remains separated by hundreds of 
miles. The haddocks that disappeared from the coast of Britain were 
found floating in shoals on the coasts of Norway. The remains of 
an immense body of herrings, that weighed down, a few seasons since, 
the nets of a crew of fishermen, in a muddy hollow of the Moray 
Frith, and defied the utmost exertions of three crews united to weigh 
them from the bottom, are, I doubt not, in the muddy hollow still. 
On a principle thus obvious it may be deemed not improbable that 
the ichthyolites of the Lower Old Red Sandstone might have had 
numerous contemporaries, of which, unless in some instances the 
same accident which killed also entombed them, we can know noth- 
ing in their character as such, and whose broken fragments may yet 
be found in some other locality, where they may be regarded as char- 
acteristic of a different formation. 
