President's Address. 143 



what is apparently a plate of Coccosteus, but which the 

 authors at the time considered as having belonged to a 

 " tortoise nearly allied to Trionyx." 



But in 1827 Dr Fleming had also obtained from the Upper 

 Old Red Sandstone of Drumdryan, near Cupar, in Fifeshire, 

 certain organic remains, of which in the same year he pub- 

 lished a preliminary notice in a local newspaper. These 

 were, in fact, the scales of the fish, which afterwards received 

 the now well-known name of Holoptychius. 



A year afterwards, scales and plates of fishes were found in 

 the upper " Old Red" of Clashbennie, in Perthshire, and were 

 by some, among whom, according to tradition, was no less a 

 personage than Dr Anderson of Newburgh, at first considered 

 to be oyster shells ! But Fleming, who lost no time in going 

 to see them, at once perceived their real nature, and accord- 

 ingly prepared a short notice, " On the Occurrence of the Scales 

 of Vertebrated Animals in the Old Red Sandstone of Fifeshire," 

 which he read before the Wernerian Society of Edinburgh in 

 May 1830, and which was published in the Edinburgh Journal 

 of Natural and Geographical Science for February 1831. In this 

 little paper, illustrated by a plate, the Clashbennie fossils are 

 also noticed, and one of them, a portion of the body of a fish, 

 was supposed by him to be "probably identical with the 

 Dipterus macropterygius of Professor Sedgwick and Mr Mur- 

 chison," but from the figure it is impossible to hazard a guess 

 as to the genus to which it really belongs. Another (fig. 3), 

 of which he says that, " in external appearance it bears a very 

 close resemblance to some of the scales on the common stur- 

 geon," looks like a plate of Pterichthys major. 



Immediately after these beginnings were being made in 

 opening out the rich storehouse of ancient fish-life contained 

 in the Scottish Old Red Sandstone strata, the equally inter- 

 esting treasures of the carboniferous rocks in the neighbour- 

 hood of Edinburgh had begun to attract notice. The greatest 

 possible interest was excited among Edinburgh naturalists by 

 Dr Samuel Hibbert's discovery of the fossiliferous nature of 

 the limestone of Burdiehouse, a member of the Lower Carboni- 

 ferous series, and the Royal Society of Edinburgh co-operated 

 energetically with that gentleman in securing a large coUec- 



