148 Proceedings of the Royal Physical Society. 



present day to suppress some feeling of wonder that a man, 

 so well versed in general zoology and anatomy as Agassiz, 

 should have based his classification of fishes upon characters 

 so trivial as the mere external aspect of their scales, or that 

 he should have distinguished many of the families into which 

 he divided the order of Ganoids by characters equally super- 

 ficial. We may quote, for instance, his inclusion among the 

 Ganoids of the Pipe-fishes, Siluroids, Globe-fishes, and Trunk- 

 fishes, merely on account of their bony scutes ; the entirely 

 artificial nature of the distinction which he drew between his 

 Ganoid families of " Lepidoids" and " Sauroids," and the con- 

 sequent utterly heterogeneous character of both ; the similarly 

 unsatisfactory nature of his family of Ccelacanthi, into which 

 he even introduced the recent Teleostean Arapaima ; — and so 

 on. However, it is at the same time only natural that he 

 should have been imperfectly acquainted with the anatomy 

 of the ancient Ganoids, considering the as yet comparatively 

 scanty material at his disposal, and it is also evident that, had 

 he devoted more time to the elucidation of osteological detail, 

 he could not possibly have gone over the same enormous 

 amount of ground within so limited a period. 



Agassiz's classification of fishes was at first eagerly accepted 

 by geologists and others, largely on account of its supposed 

 convenience. It could not, however, stand the test of ana- 

 tomical inquiry, and was soon superseded by the system pro- 

 posed by Johannes Miiller in 1844, which, with various minor 

 modifications, is the one still adhered to by most zoologists. 

 Such, however, was the influence of Agassiz, and such the 

 supposed "convenience" of his system, that we find it in use, 

 especially amongst geologists and "palaeontologists," years 

 after Miiller's great paper " Ueber den Bau und die Grenzen 

 der Ganoiden" was published. 



To us in Scotland, no fossil fish can be more interesting 

 than that huge creature, whose laniary teeth, sometimes four 

 or five inches in length, suggested the idea of a " Saurian 

 reptile" to Dr Hibbert, when he first came upon the fossil 

 riches of the Burdiehouse Limestone. We have seen that, at 

 the meeting of the British Association in 1834, Agassiz dis- 

 pelled the reptilian fancy concerning these remains, and on 



