CHAP. xxi. DIGGING IN DECEMBER. 85'J 



hour in throwing out the salt water. I was awfully 

 tired. I had to go down upon my knees on the hard 

 stone, and was bothered with the salt water, and the 

 wind and rain too. Well, I dug, and dug, and dug, and 

 at last the stone and the bone rose up of themselves. 

 I could hardly convey them home. I was tired and 

 sore ; but I am as well as ever again." 



He still went on digging among the rocks as late as 

 the month of December. " The weather," he says, " has 

 been very stormy and wet. I have been fretting rather 

 impatiently. I had settled it in my mind to go out and 

 get a fossil out of the rocks in order to vindicate the 

 truth told by Hugh Miller, or rather, my own truth ; 

 for it was from me that Hugh got his fossils. It is true 

 that I did not name them. Hugh Miller did. He 

 called this fossil Asterolepis, a fish intermediate between 

 Glyptolepis and Holoptychius. 



" Since Hugh died, some cantankerous people have 

 printed and made known that the scales figured by 

 Hugh belonged to Glyptolepis, and the head bones 

 belonged to Coccosteus thus plainly intimating that 

 Hugh had blundered, or that I had misled him ; not 

 knowing that in so doing they proclaimed their own 

 ignorance, that the head, bones, scales, and fin-rays 

 were found together stuck together ; and thus proving 

 indisputably that they belonged to one fish. It is 

 amazing what ignorance these London men exhibit. 

 They get their views from books. They should study 

 nature on the spot. They did not know that Hugh 

 came to Thurso and examined and saw the fossils in 



