508 The Geological Museum of the School of Mines, [August, 
We cannot linger over these ancient relics, which are but wait- 
ing the pen of a Hugh Miller to make them familiar to every 
reader in our land, but must pass on to other features of the 
Devonian, which are well exhibited in these cases. Our readers 
will remember that the shores of the Silurian ocean were barren 
solitudes. Not so was it in the Devonian. We have here before us 
the remains of a strange and luxuriant flora that shaded the land. 
Ferns grew luxuriantly; above these flourished the strange Zepi- 
dodendrons, with which we shall become more familiar in the age 
that follows. We have here the first appearance of the most 
beautiful of land-plants, the tree-ferns, which at the present day 
form such an attractive feature in the scenery of the tropics and 
of the islands of the South Pacific. 
The next series of cases contains the remains of the fauna and 
flora that flourished in the Carboniferous times—the age which 
witnessed the formation of the great coal-fields of America. 
Here the scene again changes. The mollusks and crustaceans, 
the huge ganoids and the strange flora, of the Devonian age, have 
disappeared never to return again. Another cycle in the world’s 
history has been completed. The fossils which we have now to 
examine are, as before, the remains of shells, fishes, plants, etc., 
but all very different from those of the Devonian. Fishes appear 
again in great numbers, but not the huge Placoganoids that we 
saw before, but the elegantly-formed Lepidoganoids, covered with 
little plates of enameled bone. The most beautiful of these fos- 
sil fishes are from the cannel coal deposits of Linton, Ohio. The 
fossilization in these specimens is peculiar. Each little plate of 
mail and each delicately-penciled fin seem wrought in gold-leaf 
ona black ground. In reality, the substance which represents 
the fish is iron-pyrites, on a surface of impure coal. These little 
fishes have received the generic title of Zurylepis, in reference to 
the breadth of their scales, and such specific names as corrugata, 
insculpta, lineata, ornatissima, etc., suggested by their delicate 
ornamentation. Specimens of Celacanthus, which occur with the 
Eurylepis, are even more highly ornamented, and have their scales 
and head-plates so elegantly chased that the most skillful gem- 
engraver could scarcely imitate their delicate tracery. The great 
fin-spines which these cases contain, show that the sharks were 
strongly represented in the Carboniferous waters. Here too are — 
oe ae teeth of the most Bynt ray ever discovered E 
