26 THE RECENT HISTORY 



— the remains of apparently a very gigantic iclithyoiite ; andj 

 communicating with me through the medium of a common 

 friend, he submitted to me, in the first instance, drawings 

 of his new set of fossils ; and ultimately, as T could arrive 

 at no satisfactory conclusion from the drawings, he with great 

 liberality made over to me the fossils themselves. Agassiz's 

 Monograph was not yet published ; nor had I an opportu- 

 nity of examining, until about a twelvemonth after, the casts 

 in the British Museum of the fossils of Professor Asmus. Be- 

 sides, all the little information, derived from various sources, 

 which I had acquired respecting the Russian ChelonichthySy — 

 for such was its name at the time, — referred it to the cui- 

 rassed type, and served but to mislead. I was assured, for 

 instance, that Professor Asmus regarded his set of remains as 

 portions of the plates and paddles of a gigantic Pterichthys, 

 of from twenty to thirty feet in length. And so, as I had 

 recognised in the Thurso fossils the peculiarities of the Ho- 

 loptychian (Celacanth) family, I at first failed to identify 

 them with the remains of the great Russian fish. All the 

 larger bones sent me by Mr Dick were, I found, cerebral ; 

 and the scales associated with these indicated, not a cuirass- 

 protected, but a scale-covered body, and exhibited, in their 

 sculptured and broadly imbricated surfaces, the well-marked 

 Celacanth style of disposition and ornament. But though 

 I could not recognise in either bones or scales the remains 

 of one iclithyoiite more of the Old Bed Sandstone, "that 

 could be regarded as manifesting as peculiar a type among 

 fishes as do the Ichthyosauri and Plesiosauri among rep- 

 tiles,"* I was engaged at the time in a course of inquiry 

 regarding the cerebral development of the earlier vertebrata, 

 that made me deem them scarce less interesting than if I 

 could. Ere, however, I attempt communicating to the reader 



* Agassiz's description of the Pterichthys, as quoted by Humboldt m 

 his Cosmos. 



