46 Fishes. 



orders appeared first on the stage, and not the lower or worm-like 

 fishes ; so our author argues that the transition to reptiles was not by 

 gradual progress, as the Lamarckian hypothesis would have it, for the 

 higher or cartilaginous fishes were predominant during the enormous 

 period represented by the five successive formations which preceded 

 the commencement of the age of reptiles. 

 The subject concludes thus : — 



" Geoffrey Hudson was a very sliort man, and Goliath of Gath a very tall one, and 

 the gradations of the human stature lie between. But gradation is not progress ; and 

 though we find full-grown men of five feet, five feet six inches, six feet, and six feet 

 and a half, the fact gives us no earnest whatever that the race is rising in stature, and 

 that at some future period the average height of the human family will he somewhat 

 between ten and eleven feet. And equally unsolid is the argument that from a prin- 

 ciple of gradation in races would deduce a principle of progress in races. The tall 

 man of six feet need entertain quite as little hope of rising into eleven feet, as the short 

 man of five ; nor has the fish that occasionally flies any better chance of passing into 

 a bird, than the fish that only swims." — p. 66. 



In proceeding to those discoveries for which we are peculiarly in- 

 debted to Mr. Miller, the Pterichthys, or winged fish, comes first in 

 order, and is certainly the most interesting. In the system of Nature 

 this strange creature would appear to be a cartilaginous fish, encased 

 in the shell of an Echinus, the very tubercles of the shell bearing out 

 the resemblance, and looking as though they had once served for the 

 attachment of some armature analogous to that of the urchins. This 

 idea seems strengthened by the opinion of Agassiz, who considers the 

 wings of Pterichthys as weapons of defence only, like the occipital 

 spines of the river bull-head ; and capable of instantaneous erection 

 on occasions of danger, but otherwise lying close by the creature's 

 side. " The river bull-head, when attacked by an enemy, erects its 

 spines at nearly right angles with the plates on its head, as if to ren- 

 der itself as difficult of being swallowed as possible." A first glance 

 at the strong and seemingly sinewy arms of the Pterichthys would in- 

 duce the belief that it moved with extreme velocity through the abyss 

 of waters, but when stripped of this supposed activity by assigning 

 another purpose to the arms, we have little more than a modified Echi- 

 nus, and may suppose it invested with a similar ornamental panoply. 



" Of all the organisms of the system, one of the most extraordinary, and in which 

 Lamarck would have most delighted, is the Pterichthys^ or winged fish, an ichthyolite 

 which the writer had the pleasure of introducing to the acquaintance of geologists 

 nearly three years ago, but which he first laid open to the light about seven years ear- 

 lier. Had Lamarck been the discoverer, he would unquestionably have held that he 

 had caught a fish almost in the act of wishing itself into a bird. There are wings 



