208 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OK, 



name which this sole representative of an extinct genus has 

 received during the course of the last few weeks from Agas- 

 siz. An Elgin gentleman forwarded to Neufchatel a singu- 

 larly fine calotype of the fossil, taken by Mr Adamson of 

 Edinburgh, with a full-size drawing of a few of the scales ; 

 and from the calotype and the drawing the naturalist has de- 

 cided that the genus is entirely new, and that henceforth it 

 shall bear the descriptive name of Stagonolepis, or drop-scale. 

 As I looked for the first time on this broken fragment of an 

 ichthyolite, the sole representative and record of an entire 

 genus of creatures that had been once called into existence 

 to fulfil some wise purpose of the Creator long since accom- 

 plished, I bethought me of Rogers' noble lines on the Torso, 



"And dost tliou still, thou mass of breathing stone, 

 (Thy giant limbs to night and chaos hurled) 

 Still sit as o the fragment of a world, 

 Surviving all ?" 



Here, however, was a still more wonderful Torso than that of 

 the dismembered Hercules, which so awakened the enthusiasm 

 of the poet. Strange peculiarities of being, singular habits, 

 curious instincts, the history of a race from the period when 

 the all-producing Word had spoken the first individuals into 

 being, until, in circumstances unfitted for their longer exist- 

 ence, or in some great annihilating catastrophe, the last in- 

 dividuals perished, were all associated with this piece of 

 sculptured stone ; but, like some ancient inscription of the 

 desert, written in an unknown character and dead tongue, its 

 dark meanings were fast locked up, and no inhabitant of earth 

 possessed the key. Does that key anywhere exist, save in 

 the keeping of Him who knows all and produced all, and to 

 whom there is neither past nor future ? Or is there a record 

 of creation kept by those higher intelligences, the first-born 

 of spiritual natures, whose existence stretches far into the 

 eternity that has gone by, and who possess, as their inheri- 



