A Retrospect of PalcBontology for Forty Years. 105 



contribution to our science, and treated most pliilosophically 

 by the author. In his paper on the Lower Carboniferous Fishes 

 of Fifeshire, Traquair enumerated 37 fishes from the Calciferous 

 Sandstone and Carboniferous Limestone series. These extraordinary 

 .fishes, with others from the Silurian of Lanarkshire (pp. 67-69, 

 1900), add to and complete a splendid record of Ichthyological 

 research, to which must be added his memoirs in the Palasonto- 

 graphical Society's volumes and in those of the Geological Survey 

 and elsewhere. 



Science gained greatly when Arthur Smith Woodward, following 

 in the steps of the veteran William Davies, took up the study of 

 fossil fishes, for not only did he, by constant energy and perseverance, 

 accomplish a vast amount of admirable work in this branch of 

 science, but he was instrumental in inspiring his senior fellow- 

 worker, Dr. Traquair, of Edinburgh, with a spirit of generous 

 rivalry, which stimulated that very deliberate and careful anatomist 

 to abandon his long accustomed habits of reserve and extreme 

 caution, and to publish in an unusually brief time many new and 

 important contributions to fossil Ichthyology. Dr. Arthur Smith 

 Woodward commenced to write on fossil fishes in this Magazine in 

 1886, by giving an account of the Selachian genus Notidanus, a shark 

 still living and extending back to the Lias ; fourteen fossil species 

 of which were duly recorded. Post-Liassic species of Acrodus and 

 Holocentrum from Malta followed, also in 1887. A beautiful jaw of 

 the Cretaceous shark Synechodus in the Brighton Museum was figured 

 and described in 1888. A gigantic species of Rhinohatis, one of the 

 Eays (commonly called 'old maids'), a Selachian fish from the 

 Lithographic Stone of Bavaria, was delineated and noted by A. Smith 

 Woodward ; Eurycormus grandis and seven other British Jurassic 

 fishes, and Omjchodus from the Devonian of Spitzbergen, were 

 recorded in 1889. In 1890 the same author described the head 

 of Eurycormus from Ely ; and i*emains of a huge fish, Leedsia 

 prohlematica, from Peterborough. Fossil fish-teeth from the Cre- 

 taceous and Tertiary of Belgium and PJiolidophorus from the Lias 

 of Whitby were noticed in 1891 ; papers on Lower Devonian 

 fish from New Brunswick, on the Devonian fish fauna of Canada, 

 and on a fossil saw-fish, Sclerorhynchus atavus, from the Lebanon 

 Cretaceous, followed in 1892. A gigantic Eocene Skate (Myliobatis) 

 from Egypt, a Greensand Pycnodont fish (Athrodon), and other 

 Upper Jurassic species appeared in 1893 ; a second British Jurassic 

 Eurycormus in 1894 ; the fossil fish fauna of the English Purbeck 

 beds, and Synopsis of Ganoid fishes of the Cambridge Greensand, in 

 1895 ; Wealden fishes in 1896 ; and as a companion to Rhinobatis 

 a still grander specimen, a Squatina, the ' angel-fish ' or monk-fish, 

 a metre in length, most beautifully preserved, from the Lithographic 

 Stone of Wurtemberg, showing the entire outline and skeleton of 

 the fish; and lastly, a Carboniferous Listr acanthus in 1903. In 1874 

 -R. Etheridge, jun., described a Petalorhynchus from E. Kilbride; 

 T. Stock a Rhizodus (nearly entire) from the Wardie shales (1881); 

 the late J. C. Mansel-Pleydell a Purbeck Histionotus (in 1889). 



