Fishes. 



47 



which want only feathers, a body which seems to have been as well adapted for passing 

 through the air as the water, and a tail by which to steer. And yet there are none of 

 the fossils of the Old Red Sandstone which less resemble anything that now exists 

 than its Pterichthys. I fain wish I could communicate to the reader the feeling with 

 which I contemplated my first-found specimen. It opened with a single blow of the 

 hammer ; and there, on a ground of light-coloured limestone, lay the effigy of a crea- 

 ture fashioned apparently out of jet, with a body covered with plates, two powerful- 

 looking arms articulated at the shoulders, a head as entirely lost in the trunk as that 

 of the ray or the sun-fish, and a long angular tail."— p. 70. 



"Imagine the figure 

 of a man rudely drawn in 

 black on a grey ground, 

 the head cut off by the 

 shoulders, the arms spread 

 at full, as in the attitude 

 of swimming, the body ra- 

 ther long than otherwise, 

 and narrowing from the 

 chest downwards, one of 

 the legs cut away at the 

 hip joint, and the other, as 

 if to preserve the balance, 

 placed directly under the 

 centre of the figu re, which 

 it seems to support. Such, 

 at a first glance, is the ap- 

 pearance of the fossil. The 

 body was of very conside- 

 rable depth, perhaps little 



less deep proportionally pterichthys or winged fish. 



from back to breast than the body of the tortoise ; the under part was flat, the upper 

 rose towards the centre into a roof-like ridge, and both under and upper were covered 

 with a strong armour of bony plates, which, resembling more the plates of the tortoise 

 than those of the crustacean, received their accessions of growth at the edges or su- 

 tures. The plates on the under side are divided by two lines of suture, which run, 

 the one longitudinally through the centre of the body, the other transversely, also 

 through the centre of it ; and they would cut one another at right angles, were there 

 not a lozenge-shaped plate inserted at the point where they would otherwise meet. — 

 There are thus five plates on the lower or belly part of the animal. They are all thick- 

 ly tuberculated outside with wart-like prominences ; the inner present appearances in- 

 dicative of a bony structure. The plates on the upper side are more numerous and 

 more difficult to describe, just as it would be difficult to describe the forms of the va- 

 rious stones which compose the ribbed and pointed roof of a Gothic cathedral, the 

 arched ridge or hump of the back requiring, in a somewhat similar way, a peculiar 

 form and arrangement of plates. The apex of the ridge is covered by a strong hexa- 

 gonal plate, fitted upon it like a cap or helmet, and which nearly corresponds in place 

 to the flat central part of the under side. There runs around it a border of variously- 



