104 MILLERS ACKNOWLEDGMENT. CHAP. ix. 



what the bone may be can only be known when it is 

 dug out." 



Hugh Miller afterwards refers to the circumstances 

 under which Dick sent him the Holoptychius. He 

 says, " I do not know what the savans of Eussia have 

 been doing for the last few years ; but mainly through 

 the labours of an intelligent tradesman of Thurso, Mr. 

 Kobert Dick one of those working men .of Scotland, of 

 active curiosity and well-developed 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 

 resides, had set himself to study its geology ; and with 

 this view he procured a copy of the little treatise on the 

 Old Red Sandstone, which was at that time, as Agassiz's 

 monograph of the Old Eed fishes had not yet appeared, 

 the only work specially devoted to the palaeontology of 

 the system so largely developed in the neighbourhood of 

 Thurso. With perhaps a single exception for the 

 Thurso rocks do not yet seem to have yielded a Pterich- 

 thys he succeeded in finding specimens, in a state of 

 better or worse keeping, of all the various ichthyolites 

 which I have described as peculiar to the Lower Old 

 Eed Sandstone. He found, however, what I had not 

 described, the remains of apparently a very gigantic 

 ichthyolite; and, 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 



