REVIEWS. 
125 
sauroid fishes—strange connecting links between fishes and alligators—so the 
Pterichthys was a Chelonian fish—a connecting link between the fish and the 
tortoise. A gurnard—insinuated so far through the shell of a small tortoise as to 
suffer its head to protrude from the anterior opening, furnished with oar-like pad¬ 
dles instead of pectoral fins, and with its caudal fin clipped to a point—would, I 
found, form no inadequate representative of this strangest of fishes. And when, 
some years after, I had the pleasure of introducing it to the notice of Agassiz, I 
found that, with all his world-wide experience of its class, it was as much an object 
of wonder to him as it had been to myself. 1 It is impossible,’ we find him saying, 
in his great work, ‘ to see aught more bizarre in all creation than the Pterichthyan 
genus : the same astonishment that Cuvier felt in examining the Plesiosaurus, I 
myself experienced when Mr. H. Miller, the first discoverer of these fossils, showed 
me the specimens which he had detected in the Old Eed Sandstone of Cromarty.’ 
And there were peculiarities about the Coccosteus that scarce less excited my 
wonder than the general form of the Pterichthys , and which, when I first ventured 
to describe them, were regarded by the higher authorities in Palaeontology as mere 
blunders on the part of the observer. I have, however, since succeeded in demon¬ 
strating that, if blunders at all—which I greatly doubt, for Nature makes very few 
;—it was Nature herself that was in error, not the observer. In this strange 
Coccostean genus, Nature did place a group of opposing teeth in each ramus of the 
lower jaw, just in the line of the symphysis—an arrangement unique, so far as is 
yet known, in the vertebrate division of creation, and which must have rendered 
the mouth of these creatures an extraordinary combination of the horizontal mouth 
proper to the vertebrata, and of the vertical mouth proper to the crustaceans. It 
Was favourable to the integrity of my work of restoration, that the press was not 
waiting for me, and that when portions of the creatures on which I wrought 
were wanting, or plates turned up whose places I was unable to determine, I 
could lay aside my self-imposed task for the time, and only resume it when some 
new-found specimen supplied me with the materials requisite for carrying it on. 
And so the restorations which I completed in 1840, and published in 1841, were 
found, by our highest authorities in 1848, after they had been set aside for nearly 
six years, to be essentially the true ones after all. I see, however, that one of the 
most fanciful and monstrous of all the interim restorations of Pterichthys given to 
the world—that made by Mr. Joseph Dinkel, in 1844, for the late Dr. Mantell, and 
published in the 6 Medals of Creation,’ has been reproduced in the recent illustrated 
edition of the 4 Vestiges of Creation.’ But the ingenious author of that work would 
scarce act prudently were he to stake the soundness of his hypothesis on the inte¬ 
grity of the restoration. For my own part, I consent, if it can be shown that the 
Pterichthys , which once lived and moved on this ancient globe of ours, ever either 
rose or sank into the Pterichthys of Mr. Dinkel, freely and fully to confess, not only 
the possibility, but also the actuality , of the transmutation of both species and 
genera. I am first, however, prepared to demonstrate, before any competent jury 
of Palaeontologists in the world, that not a single plate or scale of Mr. Dinkel’s 
restoration represents those of the fish which he professed to restore ; that the same 
judgment applies equally to his restoration of Coccosteus; and that, instead of re¬ 
producing in his figures the true forms of ancient Cephalaspians, he has merely 
given, instead, the likeness of things that never were 1 in the heavens above, or in 
the earth beneath, or in the waters under the earth.’ ” 
We have endeavoured to give our readers some idea of this most 
remarkable autobiography, in which is portrayed the working of a sensitive 
and observing mind in its passage through the great school of life. It is a 
book calculated at once to please and instruct all who are capable of 
reflecting on the aim with which it is written—to rouse to the impor¬ 
tant work of self-culture and self-government. Though there will be found 
in it the ordinary faults of an autobiography, still the absence of false 
sentiment and exaggeration must commend themselves even to the most 
