174 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR, 



cathedral ; they, on the other hand, were scales of the ancient 

 type. Again, it requires no ingenuity whatever to suffer the 

 hands and face to go naked, and such is the condition of our 

 existing fish, with their soft skinny snouts and membranous 

 fins ; but to cover the hands with flexible steel gauntlets, and 

 the face with such an iron mask as that worn by the mys- 

 terious prisoner of Louis XIV., would require a very large 

 amount of ingenuity indeed ; and the ancient ichthyolites of 

 the Old Red were all masked and gauntleted. Now the 

 detached plates and scales of the stratified clay exhibit not a 

 few of the mechanical contrivances through which the bony 

 coverings of these fish were made to unite as in coats of old 

 armour great strength with great flexibility. The scales of 

 the Osteolepis and Diplopterus I found nicely bevelled atop 

 and at one of the sides ; so that where they overlapped each 

 other, forat the joints not a needle-point could be insinuated, 

 the thickness of the two scales equalled but the thickness 

 of one scale in the centre, and thus an equable covering was 

 formed. I brought with me some of these detached scales, 

 and they now lie fitted together on the table before me, like 

 pieces of complicated hewn work carefully arranged on the 

 ground ere the workman transfers them to their place on the 

 wall. In the smaller-scaled fish, such as the Gheiracanthus 

 and Cheirolepis, a different principle obtained. The minute 

 glittering rhombs of bone were set thick on the skin, like 

 those small scales of metal sewed on leather that formed an 

 inferior kind of armour still in use in eastern nations, and 

 which was partially used in our own country just ere the buff 

 coat altogether superseded the coat of mail. I found a beauti- 

 ful piece of jaw in the clay, with the enamelled tusks brist- 

 ling on its brightly enamelled edge, like iron teeth in an iron 

 rake. Mr Parkinson expresses some wonder, in his work on 

 fossils, that in a fine ichthyolite in the British Museum, not 

 only the teeth should have been preserved, but also the lips ; 



