102 



THE GEOLOGIST. 



sizes, agreeing in nothing so much as the particularly slender and 

 narrow shape of the leaflets and branches. They look like parsley 

 leaves, coriander leaves, mimosa, and some again look like what 

 they are — finely divided ferns. Figure 7* shows the peculiarly 

 graceful character of the tribe. There are several other kinds of 

 " opfera", with which, as the Scotch song says, "I'm laith to vex ye." 

 But I must mention one that is not very common in the coal, but which 

 has been found in a perfect state in some beds older than the coal, both 

 in Ireland and in Scotland. This is the Adiantites Hibernicus, a fern 

 first brought to notice by that eminent man and ardent naturalist, 

 Edward Forbes. It is common in some rich fossil beds in the upper 

 part of the Old Red Sandstone of Ireland. It puts one in mind of the 

 fern which is the glory of Killarney — the King or Royal-fern, Osmunda 

 regalis — about the same size, and with the spreading broad leaflets set 

 on a broad stem. But whereas our Killarney friend carries her fruit on 

 her head, that is to say, the terminal leaves and pinna3 are changed into 

 fruit-bearing spikes, the fern that grew in old old times on the margin 

 of the Palaeozoic bogs has its lower or bottom pinnae crowded with seeds. 



(To be continued.) 



ON THE DISTRIBUTION OF CEPHALASPIS AND 

 PTERASPIS IN ENGLAND. 



By George E. Roberts. 



I hope our scientific tourists of the approaching season will take their 

 good eyes into Herefordshire quarries. For now that the Scotch mono- 

 poly of the Old Red fishes is broken up, they will be found to repay time 

 and trouble, if searched for in that and the adjoining counties ; and 

 something like a reasonable history of these strange old littoral fishes 

 may be the result of a single season's work. There is a great deal 

 about them well worth knowing, and their remains will be found 

 tolerably abundant, though very fragmentary, both in the sandstones 

 and cornstones ; and therefore I have a peculiar pleasure in intro- 

 ducing our primaeval fish-fauna to the notice of those on search 

 already — or hoping to be as the season advances — for relics of 

 ancient life. 



Before I call particular attention to some fruitful localities, let me 

 say a few words upon the physical condition and geographical aspect 

 of the age they lived in. Though I ought rather to say ages, for 

 they anticipated the advent of the system they are popularly said to 

 belong to — that vast life-era — the extent of whose inland-seas and 

 shallow littoral ocean- zone we see in the sandy, shaly, and gravelly 

 beds which contain ourfishes } and of whose deep seas the thick-bedded 



* The figures of Sphenopteris Scldotheimii, Adiantites Hibernicus, and Osmunda 

 rcijalis will be given in the next number. 



