Graptolites. 365 



been studied in the right way. Mr. Cole has looked at nature, 

 while very clever Mr. Hook finds his seas in his " inner con- 

 sciousness/' just as the German philosopher constructed his 

 camel out of the same material, without prejudicing his mind 

 by attention to the reality. It is astonishing how many artists, 

 and even clever ones, seem incapable of seeing the variety 

 of nature. They hit upon a conventional mode of depicting 

 rocks, trees, men, and women, as the case may be, and it 

 never occurs to them that no lofty function of art can be 

 performed by the endless repetition of the same idea. The 

 ablest of this school of error are the Linnells and Mr. Hook. 

 Their talent makes them mischievous, for though few attempts 

 may be made to imitate their particular and objectionable 

 mannerisms, they make the vice of mannerism more respectable 

 than it would otherwise seem. 



GRAPTOLITES: THEIR STRUCTURE AND 

 SYSTEMATIC POSITION.— PART II. 



BY WILLIAM CARRUTHERS, E.L.S. 



{With a Plate.) 



Classification. The generic name Graptolithus was established 

 by Linnasus, as we have seen, for a heterogeneous group of 

 objects, among which a single form of the fossils to which the 

 name is now referred, was placed by him only in the last 

 edition of the Sy sterna Natural, which had his editorial super- 

 intendence. The difficulty of confining this designation to 

 one of the various items included in the genus, and especially 

 of applying a word to these organic remains, which its author 

 employed to indicate that the species included under it were 

 imitations of and not real fossils, presented itself to those who 

 after Linnaeus studied this family. Nilsson proposed the name 

 Priodon for the true graptolites, but as this word had already 

 been given by Cuvier to a genus of fish it was withdrawn, or, 

 rather, slightly altered into Prionotus. This new form of the 

 word was first published by Hisinger, in his descriptions of 

 the fossils of Sweden, in 1887. Before this, however, Brown 

 (1835), had published the name Lomatoceras, but with a 

 strange fatality he fell into the same error as Nilsson, having 

 overlooked that this name had already been employed for a 

 genus of insects. The original name was restored by Mur- 

 chison in his Sihiria?i System (1839), in a slightly altered form 

 (Graptolites), a spelling which has been universally followed by 

 British authors. In the same work, however, Dr. Beck's note 



