﻿Vol. 66 J FOSSIL FISH-REXAIXS FROM NYASALAND. 249 



APPENDIX III. XoTES ON FOSSIL FlSH-RE MAINS FEOM XYASALAND 



COLLECTED BY Me. A. E. ANDREW AND Mr. T. E. G. BAILEY. 



By Ramsay Heatley Traqeair, M.D., LL.D., F.E.S., F.G.S. 



[Plate XIX pars.'] 



Nearly twenty-one years ago, the late Prof. Drummond placed 

 in my hands some fragmentary fish-remains which he had brought 

 with him from Maramura in Xyasaland, desiring me to write a few 

 words about them, to be inserted in his book on ' Tropical Africa,' 

 then in the press. The specimens were unfortunately very frag- 

 mentary, consisting, except in one case only, of detached scales and 

 bones, and the time allowed me to make up my mind about them 

 was only a couple of days : however, I gave names to two of them. 

 One was a piece of the hinder part of a fish, evidently a member of 

 the family Palaeoniscidae, to which I gave the name of Acrolepis (?) 

 drummondi ; the other was a detached scale which I supposed 

 might also be palaeoniscid in its nature, and doubtfully referred to 

 the same genus under the name of Acrolepis (?) africana. Con- 

 cerning the latter scale, I also noted that it bore considerable 

 resemblance to some of the scales from the European Trias named 

 by Agassiz ' Gyrolepis.' 



I had not then seen the paper by the late Prof. Dames on the 

 Ganoids of the German Muschelkalk, 1 which was published in 

 the same year (1888) ; when I did see it, I was struck by the 

 general resemblance which this scale bore to those of Cohbodus, as 

 figured in that memoir, and especially to those of Cohbodus frequens, 

 Dames. 



Some little time ago, Dr. A. S. Woodward, F.E.S., knowing that 

 these two types were in Edinburgh, sent me a small collection of 

 fish- remains collected by Messrs. Andrew & Bailey, also in Xyasa- 

 land, with the request that I would compare them with Drummond's 

 original specimens, and furnish a few notes thereon. The specimens 

 consist of portions of a hard, bluish-grey, calcareous shale, which 

 in colour and consistency are identical with the stone forming the 

 matrix of Prof. Drummond's specimens, whereby we are led to the 

 conclusion that they were obtained from the same bed or beds, 

 although the localities from which the two suites of specimens 

 have been obtained are 20 or 30 miles apart. These pieces are 

 mostly covered with an abundance of detached and jumbled scales 

 of one species of fish, which I believe I am right in identifying 

 with my ' Acrolepis (?) africana. 11 



Fig. 1 (PL XIX) represents the specimen of < africana ' collected 

 by Drummond, and my original description of it is as follows : — 



1 W. Dames, 'Die Ganoiden des deutschen Muschelkalkes ' in Dames & 

 Kayser's Palaont. Abhandl. vol. iv, pt. 2 (1888). 



