OF THE ASTEROLEPIS. 25 



the reader will see how justly the ichthyologist assigned to 

 the Asterolepis its place among the Celacanths, and how en- 

 tirely his two other conjectures regarding it have been con- 

 firmed. " I have had in general," he concluded, " but small 

 and mutilated fragments of the creature's bones submitted to 

 me, and of these, even the surface ornaments not well pre- 

 served; but I hope the immense materials with which the 

 Old Red Sandstone of Kussia has furnished the savans of that 

 country will not be lost to science ; and that my labours on 

 this interesting genus, incomplete as they are, will excite more 

 and more the attention of geologists, by showing them how 

 ignorant we are of all the essential facts concerning the his- 

 tory of the first inhabitants of our globe." 



I know not what the savans of Bussia have been doing for 

 the last few years ; but, mainly through the labours of an in- 

 telligent tradesman of Thurso, Mr Robert Dick, — one of those 

 working men of Scotland of active curiosity and well-deve- 

 loped intellect, that give character and standing to the rest, 

 — I am enabled to justify the classification and confirm the 

 conjectures of Agassiz. Mr Dick, after acquainting himself, 

 in the leisure hours of a laborious profession, with the shells, 

 insects, and plants of the northern locality in which he re- 

 sides, had set himself to study its geology ; and with this view 

 he procured a copy of the little treatise on the Old Red Sand- 

 stone to which I have already referred, and which was at 

 that time, as Agassiz's Monograph of the Old Red fishes had 

 not yet appeared, the only work specially devoted to the 

 palaeontology of the system, so largely developed in the neigh- 

 bourhood of Thurso. With perhaps a single exception, — 

 for the Thurso rocks do not yet seem to have yielded a 

 IHerkhthys, — he succeeded in finding specimens, in a state 

 of better or worse keeping, of all the various ichtliyolites 

 which I had described as peculiar to the Lower Old li^e^ 

 Sandstone. He found, however, — what I had not described, 



