272 On Shoals of Dead Fish. 



In the notice of the insular Volcano, Hotham island, which 

 was raised in the Mediterranean, near the coast of Sicily, in 

 1831, " a great quantity of dead fish was observed floating in 

 the sea the day before the island itself was discovered ;" and 

 any similar convulsion which tears open the bottom of the 

 deep, and goes through all the phases of an active volcano, 

 only submerged from human sight, must be fatal to all animal 

 life in the vicinity ; but the extent acted upon need not neces- 

 sarily be so great, and the deadly bounds of the convulsion 

 may take place within the limits of a few, and more especially 

 within the particular habitat of some one species. That these 

 submarine volcanic actions have been the cause of death to the 

 species which form many of our fossil fish-beds is most likely, 

 but it does not follow that these always took place in the vici- 

 nity of the present locality of the bed. Wherever the primary 

 destruction of the Sygnathus occurred, it is not at all probable 

 that it extended over nearly the whole range where they were 

 seen by the captain of the Harbinger — it is much more likely 

 that they were then being carried away by currents from the 

 scene of the eruption, and we can easily conceive them so carried 

 or drifted into some bay, or eddied into some hollow, and there 

 deposited in mass ; and the same causes would, ere long, cover 

 them with a layer of sand or muddy silt, and place them in a 

 modern fish-bed, far from the place of their destruction, and 

 remote from the locality where the species was known to exist. 

 Or if some shallow estuary happened to be the locality to 

 which they were carried, and if they were left there during 

 the ebb of one single tide, exposed to the sun and winds, the 

 upper layer, at least, would be dried, bent, and crooked in 

 every shape, their mouths open and their fins distended, and 

 in such forms would they be sanded and silted over. We are 

 not, therefore, in the case of fossil fishes, to consider that they 

 always inhabited the localities in which they are now disco- 

 vered. The Sygnathus was drifting over a range of many 

 miles ; its comparatively hard covering would permit it to 

 stand immersion without decomposition for some time, and the 

 state of its preservation, wherever it happened to rest or be 

 laid, would be perfect, just according to the time of its expo- 

 sure. It is remarkable that no other species was observed by 



