

RAMBLES OP A GEOLOGIST. 291 



Cromarty, Moray, and Banffj unequivocally testify ; and that 

 it may have thus not only succeeded in capturing many of its 

 light-winged contemporaries, which it would have vainly pur- 

 sued in open sea, but may have been enabled also to present 

 to its enemies, when assailed in turn, only its armed portions, 

 and to protect its unarmed parts in its burrow. It is further 

 worthy of notice, that many of the Pimelodi are furnished 

 with spines, not, like those ichthyodorulites which occur so 

 frequently in the older Secondary and Palaeozoic divisions, un- 

 finished in appearance at their lower extremity, as i, like the 

 spines of the ancient Acanthodi, or those of the recent dog- 

 fish (Spinax acanthias), they had been simply embedded in 

 the flesh, but bearing, like the wings of the Pterichthys, an ar- 

 ticulated aspect. Those of the Pimdodus rita, and Pimelodus 

 gagata are of singular beauty; and when the creatures have 

 no further use for them, and the mud of the Ganges has been 

 consolidated into shale or baked into flagstone around them, 

 they will make very exquisite fossils. A correct drawing of 

 the plates and spines of some of the members of the Pime- 

 lodi family, with a portion of the internal skeletons, arranged 

 in their proper places, but divested of those more destructible 

 parts to which they are attached, would serve admirably to 

 show what strange forms fish not greatly removed from the 

 ordinary type may assume in the fossil state, and might throw 

 some light on the extraordinary appearance assumed, as ich- 

 thyolites, by the old family of the Cephalaspians. 



The geological department of the Elgin Museum is not yet 

 very complete. The private collections of the locality, by 

 forestalling, greatly restrict the supply from the rich deposits 

 in the neighbourhood, and have an unquestioned right to do 

 so. The Museum contains, however, several interesting or- 

 ganisms. I saw, among the others, a specimen of Diplop- 

 terus, that showed the form and position of the fins of this 

 rather rare ichthyolite much better than any of the Moray- 



