238 
THE GEOLOGIST. 
older tlian the slates ; the slates were older than the traps ; and 
the traps which traversed slate and granite were older than the 
porphyries, which cut off and shifted the traps. 
On the Discovery of the Remains of Fish, and other Fossils in 
the Killas of Cornwall, by Mr. C. W. Peach. 
These remains were discovered in the slaty rocks ranging E. 
and W. of Palperro : they occured in tolerable plenty, though 
usually in a fragmentary condition. The most marked spe- 
cimens appear to be fragments of the bony plates of Cephalaspis, 
the spine of Onchus, and the dermal covering, or shagreen, of 
the Sphagodes. The author also stated that he possesed a larger 
specimen, containing apparently the scales of a ganoid fish. At 
Goran he found a conglomerate in which are large rolled masses 
of limestone, with orthoceratites, crinoidea, and corals ] and at 
Great Peraver there is a quartz rock, full of organic markings, 
resembling the tribes of the recent Sabellaria of the coast. 
Mr. Murchison observed that this discovery confirmed, in a 
very remarkable manner, the view which Mr. Sedgwick and 
himself had taken of the age of these rocks. Those fish remains 
appear to belong to the Upper Silurian, the oldest rocks in 
which the remains of any vertebrated animals have been dis- 
covered, and they occur in rocks forming the axis of S. Devon, 
which he had always considered the oldest in that country. 
Mr. Phillips stated, that the earliest discovery of remains 
of fishes in the slate rocks of Cornwall was announced in Sir H. 
De la Beche's Report ; and he had himself figured in his Talse- 
ozic Fossils^ the scale of a holoptychius, found in rocks lower 
than the Plymouth limestone, agreeing, however, more nearly 
with a species from the carboniferous series than with that of 
the old red sandstone. Mr. Phillips regarded the fish re- 
mains discovered by Mr. Peach as equally related to the car- 
boniferous and Silurian forms, and probably belonging to an 
intermediate position, on a parallel with the cornstones of Here- 
fordshire. 
