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THE OLD RED SANDSTONE FISHES OF ENGLAND. 
BY E. EAY LANKESTEE. 
T HE majority of our readers, no doubt, are acquainted with 
the charming works of the late Flugh Miller, in which 
he described with the pen of a poet and, at the same time, 
with the mind of a philosopher, the curious fossil remains which 
were found among his native hills. In fact, the Old Red Sand- 
stone fishes of Scotland were described and illustrated by him 
in such a way that they have a world-wide fame, and every 
museum has its fish from Cromarty, its Ptericthys and Coc- 
costeus. It is undoubtedly true that these two last-named 
fish were remarkable creatures, and their discovery alone was 
sufficient to attract the universal attention of the geological 
world. But meanwhile we should not forget that the old Red 
Sandstone system occurs in other localities besides Scotland, 
and that fish are found in our English rocks of that period as 
well as in the Scottish localities. We propose in the following 
pages to give a very brief account of the English fishes of the 
Old Red Sandstone ; and they certainly have as much interest 
attached to them as their northern neighbours. The beds 
which furnish the fish nodules in Scotland belong to a newer 
period than the English rocks of which we are about to speak, 
although included by geologists under one and the same 
denomination as Old Red Sandstone. Over a large part of 
Herefordshire, and some part of Worcestershire, a very dense 
and compact sandstone is worked, which is called by the 
quarrymen and countryfolk Cornstone. ” This Cornstone is 
the lowest member of the Old Red Sandstone series : if we 
pass below it we come upon the “ passage beds 93 between the 
Old Red and the Silurian systems; and in some parts of 
Herefordshire, in railway cuttings and such-like places, where 
the strata have been tilted, we can pass from one to the other 
in a few steps. The equivalents of the Scotch beds are some- 
times to be found overlying the highest portions of this 
t( Cornstone ” series; but, curious to say, they contain no fish. 
At one locality, Farlow, by great perseverance in search, a 
miniature species of Ptericthys was detected in these beds ; but 
in England it appears that we are destitute of that great variety 
of species which characterises the same beds in Scotland. On 
the other hand, in those rocks which correspond to our Corn- 
