BW Ee IN 
of the 
Buffalo Society of Natural Sciences 
VOLUME XIilI No. 1 1919 
ON THE STRUCTURE OF 
EUSTHENOPTERON 
BY 
WILLIAM L. BRYANT. 
The origin and development of the various organs which 
together compose the marvelous human machine is the most inter- 
esting problem of Palaeontology. The geologist reconstructs, as 
on a stage, the historical settings which the palaeontologist peoples 
with strange and bizarre creatures acting the great drama of the 
ages. These ancient creatures, sluggish or rapacious, possessed 
in common that mysterious and unconscious force which insured 
to certain of their descendant races unlimited physical and mental 
progress. 
The skeletal remains of these extinct animals reveal to the in- 
quirer the development of the brain, of the sense organs; the slow 
modification of the limbs as they crept from the water to the land, 
and the persistent progressional change and adaptation of one 
organ after another to new functions caused by the exigencies 
of environment. Every skeleton from the far distant past has 
its own silent story for those who care to learn. 
The studies embodied in this paper had their inception in my 
desire to illustrate the large collection of Devonian fishes in the 
Museum of the Buffalo Society of Natural Sciences with a series 
of restorations illustrating the fish life of the Devonian in 
America. The upper Devonian rocks in the vicinity of Scaum- 
