72 PEOCEEDINGS OF THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY. [Apr. 28, 



Pisces. — Eemains of Fishes are extremely abundant at Horton 

 and Albert Mine, but much less so in any other beds of this series 

 that I have examined. At Lower Horton, Halfway Eiver, and 

 Horton Bluff, there are many beds, from a line to three inches 

 in thickness, which may be regarded as consisting of scales, teeth, 

 and bones, mixed with a little siliceous sand, and united by a cal- 

 careous cement ; and such beds, with still more numerous shale- 

 surfaces covered with similar remains, are seen at intervals through 

 several hundred feet. Enormous quantities of fishes must have 

 perished in this place ; and their remains are scattered, as if dispersed 

 by currents after the decay of the animal matter. This, with the 

 great succession of beds containing such remains, indicates the long 

 resort of fishes to the ground, and the accumulation of their remains 

 in the natural course of the death of successive generations. The 

 locality of the fish-remains at Horton is very limited in area, at 

 least to the eastward, — such remains not being found at Windsor, 

 nor at Walton on the opposite side of the estuary of the Avon, 

 though fossil plants occur at these places. This fact and the in- 

 dentation in the older metamorphic region opposite Horton Bluff, 

 as well as the association of the remains with plants, erect trees, 

 and rippled, shrinkage-cracked, and worm-tracked beds, render it 

 probable that this was an old estuary, acted on by the tides and by 

 river-inundations, and long resorted to by fish, perhaps for the pur- 

 pose of spawning. 



At the Albert Mine the fish-remains are found throughout a great 

 thickness of rock and over a considerable area, since I have found 

 them equally abundant in the continuation of these beds on the east 

 side of the Petitcodiac, above Dorchester. They are usually entire, 

 or at least in groups of scales representing the body of the animal, 

 or a part of it, which appears to have been buried in sediment before 

 decay. In connexion with this difference of preservation, it may 

 be observed that the bituminous shales of the Albert Mine must 

 have been a semifluid impalpable mud, charged with vegetable 

 matter, and likely, when in a state of suspension in water, to prove 

 fatal to fishes. The removal of the free oxygen from water, by the 

 presence in it of large quantities of vegetable matter in a state of 

 putrefaction, is destructive to most fishes, except those furnished, 

 like our modern Amia and L&pidosteus, with, an auxiliary respiratory 

 organ in the form of a rudimentary lung. Most of the fossil Ganoids 

 of the coal-measures must have been similarly provided ; else they 

 could not have lived and multiplied in the putrid waters indicated 

 by the beds which contain their remains : but even they may have 

 occasionally been suffocated by unusual quantities of offensive or- 

 ganic sediment. On wide flats also, periodically inundated and dry, 

 large quantities of them, venturing, like the fishes observed by 

 Livingstone in the plains of Loudo, far from the perennial streams, 

 must often have perished. 



At the Albert Mine, so far as yet known, all the fishes appear to 

 have belonged to the family Lepidoidea, the larger predaceous races 

 being absent. At Horton, on the contrary, though remains of Lepi- 



