3480 The Zoologist — April, 1873. 



" The river nobly foams and flows, 

 The charm of this enchanted ground, 

 And all its thousand tui-ns disclose 

 Some fresher beauty varying round ; 

 The haughtiest breast its wish might bound, 

 Through life to dwell delighted here; 

 Nor could on earth a spot be found 

 To Nature and to me so dear." 



But Mr. Knox has introduced into his little book the apocryphal 

 story of 



" That dever bird on the banks of Nile 

 That picks the teeth of the crocodile," 



and that other little bird that warns the ponderous rhinoceros of 

 the approach of his ruthless murderer, and has detailed in extenso 

 the somewhat threadbare discoveries in "old red" made by our 

 friend Miller, chronicled in all our memories, and copied into all 

 our books, long, long ago : thirty years, a generation, have passed 

 away again since those wonderful creatures Pterichthys, Coccosteus 

 and Cephalaspis were figured and described in the ' Zoologist,' to 

 astonish the simple and perplex the speculative, who hesitated to 

 decide whether they were endosteate or exosteate. It is pleasant 

 to see such speculations revived, and to read of Mr. Knox's 

 researches at Tynet Burn, which if they do not emulate those 

 of Hugh Miller, at least testify to a lively interest in his dis- 

 coveries. 



Before I quite relinquish the critic's pen, I may state that some 

 of Mr. Knox's expressions are not in exact accordance with my own 

 ideas of cosmical phenomena; thus the Scotch firs, which we see 

 on many of the Scotch hills, are called, at pp. 10,58,&c., "primaeval 

 pines." I will not assert that these pines are not " primaeval," but 

 their appearance, and I am very familiar with them, seems to bring 

 the rather indefinite period expressed by that word much nearer 

 our own time than I had supposed. This primaeval vegetation 

 afforded our author an opportunity of observing a flock of crossbills 

 splitting the fir-cones and extracting the seeds. 



" I was especially surprised at the total absence of all kinds of small birds, 

 some of which, such as tlie great tit, the blue tit, or their congeners, the marsh 

 or the cole tit, I should haye expected to see or hear even at this season, or 

 at least to have caught a glimpse of some feathered inhabitants of the forest. 

 This circumstance had just recurred to my memory with redoubled force, as 



