from their forms, as kindred
species. It were very desirable that we had a good monograph of the
Irish Old Red plants, the contemporaries of the latter, as the
completest and best preserved representatives of the Middle Palaeozoic
flora yet found. Sir Roderick Murchison has figured a single pinnae of
this Cyclopterus in his recently published "Siluria;" and Sir Charles
Lyell, both that and one of its contemporary Lepidodendra, in the last
edition of his "Elements." These interesting fragments, however, serve
but to excite our curiosity for more. When urging Professor Edward
Forbes on the subject, ere parting from him for, alas! what proved to be
the last time, he intimated an intention of soon taking it up; but I
fear his purposed monograph represents only one of many works, important
to science, which his untimely death has arrested for mayhap long years
to come.

In the uppermost beds of the Upper Old Red formation in Scotland, which
are usually of a pale or light yellow color, the vegetable remains again
become strongly carbonaceous, but their state of preservation continues
bad,--too bad to admit of the determination of either species or genera;
and not until we rise a very little beyond the system do we find the
remains of a flora either rich or well preserved. But very remarkable is
the change which at this stage at once occurs. We pass at a single
stride from great poverty to great wealth. The suddenness of the change
seems suited to remind one of that experienced by the voyager,
when,--after traversing for many days some wide expanse of ocean,
unvaried save by its banks of floating sea weed, or, where occasionally
and at wide intervals, he picks up some leaf-bearing bough, or marks
some fragment of drift weed go floating past,--he enters at length the
sheltered lagoon of some coral island, and sees all around the deep
green of a tropical vegetation descending in tangled luxuriance to the
water's edge,--tall, erect ferns, and creeping lycopodiaceae, and the
pandanus, with its aerial roots and its screw-like clusters of narrow
leaves, and, high over all, tall palms, with their huge pinnate fronds,
and their curiously aggregated groups of massive fruit. And yet the
more meagre vegetation of the earlier time is not without its special
interest. The land plants of the Old Red Sandstone seem to compose, all
over the world, the most ancient of the terrestrial floras. It was held
only a few years ago, that the Silurian