142 Proceedings of the Royal Physical Society. 



the type of the modern fish, and that of vertebrata higher in 

 the scale, and which, represented in the present era only by 

 a few isolated forms, attained an immense development in 

 ancient periods of the world's history. And for the study of 

 these, we may safely say that, on the whole, no country 

 affords better opportunities than this northern division of our 

 Island of Great Britain. 



Although works containing notices of fossil fishes had ap- 

 peared on the Continent as early as the fifteenth century, we 

 find no mention of such remains in Scotland until David Ure, 

 in his " History of Eutherglen and East Kilbride," which was 

 published in 1793, figured, among other carboniferous fossils, 

 several relics of the fishes of that epoch. These are mostly 

 the teeth of Selachii or sharks, but there is also a figure repre- 

 senting what is most undoubtedly a portion of the mandible 

 of the gigantic ganoid fish now known as Phizodus Hihberti. 

 In those days, however, there were very few people in Scot- 

 land who troubled themselves about fossils, and it was not 

 until the end of the third and commencement of the fourth 

 decades of the present century that its palseichthyological 

 treasures began to attract any real attention. 



In the year 1827 the Eev. Prof. Sedgwick and Mr, after- 

 wards Sir Eoderick, Murchison, who had been exploring the 

 sedimentary rocks of the north of Scotland, despatched to 

 Baron Cuvier, for his opinion, a number of fossil fishes which 

 they had found in the dark schists of Caithness ; other speci- 

 mens they sent also to Messrs Valenciennes and Pentland. 

 In 1828 the first-named gentlemen communicated the results 

 of their labours to the Geological Society of London, in a 

 paper entitled, "On the Structure and Eelations of the 

 Deposits contained between the Primary Eocks and the 

 Oolitic Series in the North of Scotland," and in this paper 

 they founded the genus Dipterus, giving excellent figures of 

 four supposed species. Baron Cuvier's opinion regarding 

 these fishes was to the effect that they were allied to the 

 Zepidosteus, or bony pike of North America, and belonged, 

 like it, to his division of Malacopterygii dbdominales. The 

 genus Osteolepis was also mentioned on the authority of 

 Valenciennes and Pentland, and a figure is also given of 



