FISHES OF THE PAST AND PRESENT. 465 



he found that its bed had been excavated, 

 and the outline of its shores determined. 

 But perhaps the inhabitants of the lake itself 

 occupied him even more than its conforma- 

 tion or its surrounding features. Not only 

 for its own novelty and variety, but for its 

 bearing on the geographical distribution of 

 animals, the fauna of this great sheet of fresh 

 water interested him deeply. On this journey 

 he saw at Niagara for the first time a living 

 gar-pike, the only representative among mod- 

 ern fishes of the fossil type of Lepidosteus. 

 From this type he had learned more perhaps 

 than from any other, of the relations between 

 the past and the present fishes. When a 

 student of nineteen years of age, his first 

 sight of a stuffed skin of a gar-pike in the 

 Museum of Carlsruhe told him that it stood 

 alone among living fishes. Its true alliance 

 with the Lepidosteus of the early geological 

 ages became clear to him only later in his 

 study of the fossil fishes. He then detected 

 the reptilian character of the type, and saw 

 that from the articulation of the vertebra 

 the head must have moved more freely on the 

 trunk than that of any fish of our days. To 

 his great delight, when the first living speci- 

 men of the gar-pike, or modern Lepidosteus, 



30 



