OF CREATION. 



97 



sent many remarkable and close analogies to the true 

 saurians or reptiles, and for this reason the one first 

 determined was named Sauroid,* The sauroid or 

 reptilian fishes, although met with throughout in the 

 rocks of the secondary epoch, and often very abun- 

 dant, nowhere attain so great a magnitude, or offer 

 such perfect types of their development, as in the 

 earlier seas, whose inhabitants we are now consi- 

 dering. 



So intimate is the resemblance, and so nearly per- 

 fect the passage between fishes and reptiles through 

 these sauroid fishes, that very little is wanting to 

 complete our knowledge of the numerous extinct 

 forms, in spite of the rarity of existing species with 

 which to compare them.'f It will, however, be 

 better to confine our attention chiefly to the one or 

 two genera most remarkable and most characteristic, 

 in order to obtain an idea of the peculiarities which 

 distinguished the ancient fishes from their living type. 



The MegaUchthy8\ (fig. 41), as its name imports, 

 was an animal of large size, and seems also to have 

 been of great strength. Its head was large, and the 

 gape of the jaws enormous ; the jaws themselves pow- 

 erful, and provided with a range of most formidable 

 teeth, of which some of enormous size projected far 

 beyond the rest, as is the case with the crocodile. The 



* 2aupo (sauros), a lizard; ufiwv (eidon), resembling: from the 

 strong saurian or reptilian analogies exhibited, chiefly in the teeth. 



t The existing sauroid fishes consist of seven species only, five of them 

 belonging to the genus Lepidosteus, or bony pike, which are sufficiently com- 

 mon in the great American rivers ; and two species of Polypterus, one 

 from the Nile, and the other from the Niger. The scale of one species of 

 Lepidosteus is figured in page 61, fig. 20. 



J MtyaXrj, (megale), great ; i\QvQ (ichthys), a fish. 



F 



