162 



Miscellaneous. 



verer to be a fish resembling the Angel Fish, was rejected by Agassiz 

 from that class of animals ; whilst neither he nor any other natu- 

 ralist could even conjecture to what class in the anirna! kingdom it 

 should be referred, and in this enigmatic state it was left by Agassiz 

 in the notice given of it in his ' Poissons Fossiles.' At the late 

 Meeting at Glasgow, this enigma found its solution by our recog- 

 nising in the College Museum some of the most perplexing charac- 

 ters of the Clashbinnie fossil in two large specimens of Eurypterus 

 in sandstone from the coal-field of that neighbourhood. We had 

 before seen, at the Edinburgh Meeting, a remarkable fossil Crus- 

 tacean, nearly of the size and form of a large Molucca crab, found 

 by Dr. Simson in the carboniferous limestone of Kirkton near Bath- 

 gate, between Edinburgh and Glasgow ; and Dr. Harlan had de- 

 scribed and figured a smaller species of Eurypterus from the car- 

 boniferous limestone of the United States (see Fourth Report of 

 British Association, 1834, p. 643). We have, therefore, now ex- 

 tended our knowledge of the range of this very remarkable family 

 of Crustaceans from the sandstone and limestone of the coal forma- 

 tion downwards into the old red sandstone. 



M. Fischer de Waldheim has lately discovered a new species of 

 Eurypterus, E. tetragonophthalmus, in the transition formation of 

 Podolia, nearly allied to the small species in the grauwacke of West- 

 moreland in New York, on which this genus was founded by Dr. 

 Dekay. (Annals of the Lycaeum of Nat. Hist., vol. i. p. 375, pi. 29.) 



FOSSIL ARACHNIDANS. 



In the family of Arachnidans we have an account by M. Corda, 

 in the Report of the National Museum of Bohemia, 1839, of a 

 second new genus of fossil Scorpioid, Microlabis Sternbergii, dis- 

 covered by the late Count Sternberg in 1838, in the same quarry 

 with the new genus Cyclophthalmus, found by him a few years before 

 in a similar sandstone of the coal formation at Chomle, near Rad- 

 nitz, in Bohemia*. M. Corda places this new fossil in the class of 

 Pseudo-scorpions, near the Chelifer and Obisium of Leach : it is 

 larger than the living Obisium carcinoides. In this, as in the Cy- 

 clophthalmus Sternbergii, the skin is preserved in several parts of the 

 body in the state of a brown, semi-transparent, horn-like substance, 

 over which pores of the tracheae and indications of hairs are di- 

 spersed at regular intervals. The enduring nature of the peculiar 

 substance (chitine or elytrine), of which, like the elytra of beetles, 

 the skin of scorpions is composed, explains the cause of its perfect 

 preservation in such ancient sandstone. M. Corda justly considers 

 these two fossil scorpioids of Bohemia (the only two of which any 

 account has been yet published) to be among the most remarkable 

 discoveries of modern times. 



The Marquis of Northampton has recently acquired four new 

 species of fossil spiders, one of them imbedded in the lithographic 

 stone of Solenhofen, the other three from the freshwater formation 

 of Aix. The Solenhofen fossil has ten legs, and is considered by 

 Mr J. E. Gray to be nearly allied to the genus Nymphon, the living 



* Figures of this unique fossil are given in pi. 46'. of my Bridgewater 

 Treatise. 



