AND DEVONIAN CONODONTS. 355 
either a clouded fibrous appearance, or seem to be composed of minute 
nuclei, as represented by Pander (Monogr. tab. 24. figs. 11, 12). 
Hitherto the Conodonts have only been found as detached speci- 
mens, scattered irregularly throughout the rock; but I have one 
example, from the Genesee bituminous shale, in which a group of 
various forms of teeth and plates have been compressed together in 
such a manner as to show that they must have belonged to the same 
animal. Unfortunately the teeth in this specimen are so crushed 
that nothing can be ascertained as to their natural arrangement ; 
at the same time their numbers and variety of form show no resem- 
blance to those of any existing animal, so that very little fresh 
knowledge can be gained from this specimen beyond the fact that, 
whatever may have been the zoological relations of the animal, it 
possessed a complicated and varied apparatus of teeth and plates. 
I submitted my specimens to Professor Huxley, who expressed 
the opinion that some of them so closely resemble the teeth of the 
Hag-fish (Myaine) that it would be difficult to prove that they 
did not belong to fishes of this order; at the same time no living 
fish exhibited an assemblage of teeth and plates at all similar 
to those shown in the fossil example (Plate XVI. figs. 6-18). 
From a microscopical examination of original specimens of Cono- 
donts from Russia, Professor Owen states, in the first edition of his 
‘ Paleontology,’ 1870, that only those referred by Pander to the 
genera Ctenognathus, Cordylodus, and Gnathodus had any probable 
claims to vertebrate rank, but they might also be only remains of 
the dentated claws of Crustacea. In the second edition of the same 
work, however, Professor Owen concludes that they have most 
analogy with the spines, or hooklets, or denticles of naked Mollusks 
or Annelids. 
Whilst the discovery of these American Conodonts, of which some 
are identical with, and all generally resemble, those from corre- 
sponding rock-formations in Russia, proves the very wide distribu- 
tion of these bodies, the conditions under which they appear and the 
fossils associated with them in America assist but little in solving 
the question as to their relations. In the Cambro-Silurian rocks 
the fossils of marine invertebrates are very varied and abundant; 
but there are no large Gasteropods whose lingual teeth could be 
supposed to be similar to Conodonts, nor the carapaces or segments 
of any Crustaceans to which they could have been attached as de- 
fensive spines. In the Devonian strata, where the Conodonts are 
much more numerous and diversified in form than in the lower 
rocks, the only invertebrate fossils accompanying them are Crinoids 
and Brachiopods; but there are here plenty of fragments of undis- 
puted fish-teeth and bones. There is thus the same ground as in 
Russia for the supposition that the Conodonts were the only parts 
of the organism to which they were attached capable of fossilization, 
and that the body of the animal might have been composed of 
nothing more durable than the cartilaginous structures of the lower 
orders of fishes, or the soft tissues of Annelids and naked Mollusks. 
That, however, the Conodonts cannot be referred to the horny jaws 
